Showing entries 61 to 70 of 72
« 10 Newer Entries | 2 Older Entries »
Displaying posts with tag: Sysadmin (reset)
Multisourced Production Infrastructure: History, and a stab at the Future

Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time!

1999: You must have funding

The first startup I was ever involved in was a web startup. It was an online retailer. They were starting from nothing. My friend (a former coworker from an earlier job) had saved for years to get this idea off the ground. He was able to get a few servers, some PCs for the developers he hired, and he got the cheapest office space in all of NYC (but it still managed to be a really cool space, in a way that only NYC can pull off), and he hosted every single service required to run the web site in-house. If I recall correctly, he had a web and database server on one machine, and I believe the primary DNS server was on an old …

[Read more]
A Couple of MySQL Performance Tips

If you’re an advanced MySQL person, you might already know these, in which case, please read anyway, because I still have some questions. On the other hand, f you’re someone who launched an application without a lot of database background, thinking “MySQL Just Works”, you’ll eventually figure out that it doesn’t, and in that case, maybe these tips will be of some use. Note that I’m speaking specifically about InnoDB and MyISAM, since this is where most of my experience is. Feel free to add more to this content in the comment area. 

InnoDB vs. MyISAM

Which one to use really depends on the application, how you’re deploying MySQL, your plans for growth, and several other things. The very high-level general rule you’ll see touted on the internet is “lots of reads, use MyISAM; lots of writes, use InnoDB”, but this is really an oversimplification. Know your application, and know your data.  If all of …

[Read more]
MySQL Conf08 - My Interview with Jennifer Venable of Red Hat

Last Tuesday when I was walking the show floor at the MySQL conference, I ran into a familiar name,  Jennifer Venable.  I had never met Jennifer before but we had traded mails and had spoken on the phone.  This was about 18 months ago when we were negotiating the renewal of Sun's contract as an Authorized Distributor of Red Hat.  At that time, Jennifer was the Red Hat lawyer working on the contract.

Well since that time Jennifer has escaped from the Red Hat legal ranks and has joined the business side where, as of a couple of months ago, she took over as head of the Red Hat Exchange. 

Take a listen.

My interview with Jennifer (12:25)  Listen (

[Read more]
Is this thing on?

Since the recovery from my recent outage, I’ve noticed that none of the normal feed sites where my posts normally show up caught the last post, so this is a test post to see what’s going on, if it was a temporary glitch, or what.

If you didn’t see the post linked above, please read it if you’re happy with your web host. I’m looking for a new one :-/

Need a new web host

Ok, this blog is currently hosted by 1and1.com, and I think that needs to change, which is sad, because up until recently, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I recently had an issue, and some things came to light about my package that I wasn’t aware of.

First of all, the maximum time a process can run is about 6 seconds. Second of all, the maximum number of processes you can have running at once is 12. When I asked if this was a limitation of my *package*, the answer I got was that it was a limitation of all shared hosting accounts.

This blog started throwing 500 errors some time yesterday. I called support late last night and some lady said that she was running a tool that should fix my issue, and to call back in 30 minutes if the problem persists. Well, I’m sick as a dog, and it was late, so I went to bed. This morning, the problem was still there. I called support 3 times today, got cut off twice, and …

[Read more]
Saying What You Mean

Ah, the perils of working in a shared, client environment. One client has us using a login that is not exclusive to us. I prefer using bash; the client is set to use zsh. This is not a problem in and of itself.

However, there is a section in the .profile that is causing me issues:

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
        exit
fi

So, “If ksh exists, run it with some options to edit history with vi-like commands”. Except what we really want is “If you’re using the ksh as a shell, . . . .”

So I added a modification, and now all is fine.

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        if [ "$SHELL" = "/usr/bin/ksh" ]; then
                /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
                exit
        fi
fi

(not all my problems are MySQL related!)

How to advocate for good backups! Or, how NOT to advocate for good backups!

I try to do a decent job of advocating for caring about good backups and business continuity strategies in my 7 Deadly Habits article. But this one beats them all:

Just too funny and great not to share. Found via this reddit article, where there is a lively discussion underway.

How to find out the machine ID on various UNIXes

It recently came up that it would be helpful if we had a cheat sheet to find out the machine names for any given UNIX. I knew these off the top of my head but it would be great if people added more as comments.

HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i
IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m
SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s
Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid

Review: MySQL Database Design and Tuning

First time for me to review a book on Sensual, but I just finished MySQL Database Design and Tuning by Robert D. Schneider (MySQL Press, ISBN 0-672-32765-1), and considered it to be both a good read and am sure it will prove a good reference in the future. For the most part, the author is straight to the point providing realistic scenarios and solutions. He also covers a plethora of variables that affect database performance, and exactly how to monitor certain aspects to determine which settings to adjust.

His primary focus is on MyISAM and InnoDB, as they are the most popular, but he does have a brief chapter at the end of the book covering NDB (Clustering). Overall, it was worth the read, so if you’re struggling with database performance, or just feel like getting more into the database administration side of MySQL, pick up a copy =)

Sphinx Fulltext Search Engine Part III (continued)

I’m finally taking the time to continue this series =)

Lyrics Grep

For testing purposes, I went ahead and scraped about 60,000 song lyrics off of a number of sites and developed a simple search engine for them. The script that did the scraping is pretty nasty (to handle equally nasty HTML that I had to parse through), so I’m going to refrain from posting that script and save myself some embarrassment. Make a pot of coffee, sit down, and write one yourself (or something else that’s similar enough).

Database Schema

I created a new database called lyricsgrep with the following simple …

[Read more]
Showing entries 61 to 70 of 72
« 10 Newer Entries | 2 Older Entries »