Linux System Admins Blog

System admins of Promet – an e-commerce, high availability Open Source web shop – share their findings

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Entries from October 2009

Amazon EC2 prices fall + High Memory Instances + RDS

October 27th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Amazon announced a couple of cool new things this morning. Standard and High CPU Linux/UNIX EC2 instances hourly prices in the US and Europe have dropped by 15% and will go into effect November 1st. 2 new types of EC2 instance is now available called “High-Memory”. High-Memory Instances are designed to be used with memory-intensive [...]

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Tags: Installation

Problem with Lilo Boot Loader

October 27th, 2009 · No Comments

Lately, we installed additional memory on our Debian (lenny) servers and installed ‘bigmem’ kernel for our 32-bit systems to recognize more than 3GB of ram. Bigmem kernel installations went fine on servers with Grub as their boot loader – most of them uses Grub. But on one machine with Lilo as boot loader, [...]

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Tags: Debian · Installation

WhiteHouse.org goes Open Source – with Drupal

October 25th, 2009 · No Comments

See the www.whitehouse.org story at TechPresident.com, here is the excerpt:
WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as [...]

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Tags: Installation

Linux will take mobile with Android, plus Android turns one!

October 25th, 2009 · No Comments

While we all love linux here at LInux System Admin Blog – we do however have different favorites for mobile devices.   Yes, the big favorite is the iPhone, not for me though.  I have been excited about the Android OS and the devices ever since I have heard about it.
This week the devices have [...]

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Tags: Installation

SysAdmin Tool of the Week: Update-Scout

October 21st, 2009 · No Comments

Ok, we will start with this new section on our blog, the “SysAdmin Tool of the Week”, to feature cool and useful tools used by Promet systems administrators. This will include websites, software/applications, and hardware as well.
For our Sysadmin Tool of the Week it is Update Scout. This site notifies you for updates [...]

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Tags: software / tools

php 5.2.9 on RHEL5.x (for Drupal 6)

October 21st, 2009 · No Comments

Latest version of PHP available for RHEL5.x is 5.1.6 and no new RedHat releases are coming as packaging has ceased. You can get PHP 5.3 for RHEL5 from Remi, but it it’s incompatible with latest versions of Drupal, Civicrm or many modules so we need the a 5.2X branch of PHP. This requires building php [...]

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Tags: HowTo · Installation · drupal

Apple sold 3.1 million Macs in the last three months, 17% more than a year ago

October 21st, 2009 · No Comments

I thought that at least 10% of our readers would appreciate this information – or at least be already aware of it.  For a more details and a full story – you can check out the apple.com investors section or the WSJ article.
Why 10%?  According to our analytics here is our visitors operating system breakdown [...]

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Tags: desktop

Managed DNS services showdown

October 19th, 2009 · No Comments

A time comes when it makes more business sense to outsource DNS. While one can use a domain registrars to manage and host dns they do not always offer best performance or even offer SLA’s. We will compare a couple of companies that specialize at DNS hosting only.
DynDNS
- comprehensive services offerings
- no downtimes since inception [...]

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Tags: hosting

Change Squid outgoing address

October 19th, 2009 · No Comments

Typically Squid caching proxy server listen and outgoing IP address are the same. Sometimes, for various reasons we want to alter the outgoing IP address. The new address must first be brought up as an interface on the squid server. In squid.conf look for tcp_outgoing_address line, uncomment it and replace the default IP value with [...]

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Tags: Installation · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

How are servers like kitchens?

October 12th, 2009 · No Comments

So a sys admin, an architect and a project manager walk into a bar… so I wish this was a beginning of a good joke, but essentially that was the story last weekend and I want to share the delicous morsel of wisdom I have learned from the architect.
The project manager was asking the system [...]

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Tags: Installation