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Entries Tagged as 'Tips and Tricks'

Enable/Disable APC on virtual host level

March 18th, 2010 · No Comments

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. APC is a great tool to speed up a php driven site and I can’t even think of a big site running on a php framework without an opcode cache (other good choices are eaccelerator or xcache). [...]

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Tags: Performance · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

Problem Moving Drupal Site With SecurePages Module Enabled

February 17th, 2010 · No Comments

I made a copy of Drupal6 site with SecurePages module installed and configured. This module is configured to redirect all or certain pages to https – depending on your configurations. For our setup we usually include the login and admin sections to redirect to https.
The problem is on the copied site that is [...]

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Tags: HowTo · Tips and Tricks · drupal

Making Changes to Drupal Core

February 15th, 2010 · No Comments

Although we made it a standard not to make any changes to Drupal core and core modules, there are times that our developers really need to make changes to core modules in order to add the required functionality. Cases like additional feature for ‘user’ or ‘comment’ modules and so on. At this state [...]

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Tags: HowTo · Tips and Tricks · drupal

cvs [checkout aborted]: absolute pathnames invalid for server

February 3rd, 2010 · No Comments

Absolute Path Error:
cvs [checkout aborted]: absolute pathnames invalid for server (specified `/path/drupalsite/’)
Ok, I got the error above when I performed Drupal CVS update on our Debian server (newly installed CVS 1.12.13). The same command works on other server with older CVS installation. The issue is the reference to local cvs directory [...]

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Tags: Debian · Security · Tips and Tricks · drupal

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

HowTo display PHP errors when you don’t have access to php.ini

September 15th, 2009 · 1 Comment

If you are using a shared server, or just have a limited account on your company servers, you might not have access to your php configuration file php.ini (this is usually found under /etc/php.ini in rhel/centos and /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in debian/ubuntu). Still, in many situations it might be needed to enable php errors in the browser [...]

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Tags: CLI · Centos · Debian · HowTo · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

Using wildcards in nginx valid_referers

August 25th, 2009 · 1 Comment

This quick post will show how we can easily allow only certain http referrers see some location using nginx. This might be useful for example if you are using nginx as a static content provider and want to not allow everyone hot-linking your images and only your own sites. Doing something like this in nginx [...]

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Tags: HowTo · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

Using svn+ssh with a non-standard ssh port

August 17th, 2009 · No Comments

Many people use subversion over ssh for a simple and secure way to work on remotely hosted svn repositories. This is normally as simple as running:
svn co svn+ssh://user@server/repo .
If the remote ssh server is not running on the default ssh port (tcp 22) then this needs a little tweaking to get it working. Normally I [...]

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Tags: CLI · HowTo · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

Setup Nagios User to View Specific Host and Services

May 14th, 2009 · No Comments

This guide will help you setup Nagios user to have limited access to host and service checks. It is helpful when you want to allow your customers or clients to view and receive alerts on their servers and services, like for dedicated servers.
Procedure:
Contacts: Create new contact definitions for your client.
[...]

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Tags: HowTo · Nagios · Tips and Tricks · monitoring