I’ve packaged up and released version 1.1.2 of the Cacti templates I’ve written for MySQL, Apache, memcached, nginx etc.

Anyone who would like to help write documentation (or do anything else, for that matter) is welcomed to participate. I’ll give commit access at the drop of a hat.

Changelog:

2009-05-07: version 1.1.2

        * The parsing code did not handle InnoDB plugin / XtraDB (issue 52).
        * The servername was hardcoded in ss_get_by_ssh.php (issue 57).
        * Added Handler_ graphs (issue 47).
        * Config files can be used instead of editing the .php file (issue 39).
        * binary log space is now calculated without a MySQL query (issue 48).
        * There was no easy way to force inputs to be filled (issue 45).
        * Some graphs were partially hidden without --lower-limit (issue 43).
        * Flipped some elements across the …

Cacti is a great tool for collecting information about systems and graphing it. However, it likes to use SNMP, and SNMP is often not desirable. Instead, I often see the need for a method that is:

• Secure. Use trusted, well-known, encrypted communication. Do not open up new ports.
• Zero install on the monitored system.
• As little installation or modification on the monitoring system as possible.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly created more and more software to create Cacti graphs via standard POSIX command-line utilities over SSH with key-pair authentication. (I’ve also created similar software for Nagios, but that’s another matter.) The major problem with the work I’ve done is that it’s totally un-publicized.

The system works by passing command-line arguments to a local PHP script like any other Cacti script. This …

Many people know me as a nginx web server evangelist. But as (IMHO) any professional I think that it is really rewarding to know as much as possible about all the tools available on the market so every time you need to make a decision on some technical issue, you’d consider all pros and cons based on my own knowledge.

This is why when I received an email from Packt company asking if I’d like to read and review their book on Lighttpd I decided to give it a shot (I usually do not review any books because I do not always have enough time to read a book thoroughly to be able to write a review). So, here are my impressions from this book.

First, when I received the book, I was in doubt: how such a small book could cover so flexible and multi-purpose piece of software like …

If you’d take a look at any web site, you will notice, that almost all of the pages on this given site are pretty static in their nature. Or course, this site could have some dynamic elements like login field or link in the header, some customized menu elements and some other things… But entire page could be considered static in many cases.

When I started thinking about my sites from this point of view, I understood, how great it would be to be able to cache entire page somewhere (in memcache for example) and be able to send it to the user without any requests to my applications, which are pretty slow (comparing to memcache ) in content generation. Then I came up with a pretty simple and really powerful idea I’ll describe in this article. An idea of caching entire pages of the site and using my application only to generate small partials of the page. This idea allows me to handle hundreds of queries with one server running pretty slow …

So, we did it! New Best Tech Videos site version has been released today. Of course, it could have some issues, and we are really looking forward for your feedback on our support forums.

Let’s review main improvements we’ve made here:

• First of all, I want to mention our first step to socialization of the BTV - all our users could signup now and get their own lists of favorited, commented and voted videos and much more - they could have their own personal RSS feeds.
• Next cool thing we’ve prepared for you is user-generated content! You can find some great videos on the Net and share them with fellow BTV readers. At this moment our posting system works in pre-moderated mode to keep really high level of videos we post here, but later we want to delegate …

This blog turned 1 year old last month and I think all of my readers were glad to read it. I’ve never asked for help and I offered help to people who needed it. But today I’m forced to ask my readers for help because it is the first time in my long practice when I really don’t know how to solve my problem.

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Sometimes you may need to implement controlled downloads when all downloads requests being sent to your script and then this script decides what to do: to send some file to the user or to show some access denied page or, maybe, do something else. In lighttpd server it can be done by returning X-Sendfile header from script. Nginx have its own implementation of such idea using X-Accel-Redirect header. In this short post I will try to describe how to use this feature from PHP and Rails applications.

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I was looking forward for this feature for last 3 months! And at last, it is there! Now, nginx works on our streaming servers perfectly and flv streaming will not be Lighttpd’s unique feature anymore. This post is about how to use new Nginx module http_flv_module introduced in 0.4.7 (but there was a bug in its implementation, that can be fixed with my patch) and made completely perfect in 0.4.8.

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If you will try to compile nginx in Redhat Linux, you can get following error even if you have pcre-devel package installed:

Configuration summary + threads are not used + PCRE library is not found .... .... ./configure: error: the HTTP rewrite module requires the PCRE library. You can either disable the module by using --without-http_rewrite_module option, or install the PCRE library into the system, or build the PCRE library statically from the source with nginx by using --with-pcre= option.

If you are experiencing this small problem, you should simply use following parameter of configure script:

# ./configure --with-cc-opt="-I /usr/include/pcre"

And voila!

+ using system PCRE library

Now it can see and will use system PCRE library.