Monthly Archives: October 2012

AWS – Promote read replica to a standalone RDS instance

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Andy

In order to scale the Amazon database (RDS) you could either reboot the RDS instance to a larger size or create a slave RDS instance called a read replica. Adding more read replicas allowes for offloading of the read-only queries. … Continue reading →

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Development Servers?

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Russ

It is rare these days to find anyone who is doing development work within their live infrastructure, especially when it comes to the bigger sites which is running on multiple servers. So how practical is it to keep development servers … Continue reading →

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Kernel VM Dirty Ratio

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Chris

I’ve seen a few servers in the last few weeks becoming unreachable due to the memory usage. These issues have looked to have been caused by processes being blocked by the kernel as it tries to reserve too much memory … Continue reading →

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All the business servers of the world…

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Mirek

…have processed over 9.57 zebibyte (10^21=2^70) of data (9 570 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes) accordingly to last research from few years ago. If all these zeros and ones were written in books a pile or rather tower … Continue reading →

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Ubuntu’s New DNS

Posted on October 17, 2012 by David C

When configuring network settings for an ubuntu server, you simply edit the /etc/network/interfaces with the correct information. If you make changes there, then you need to add the DNS manually, in the /etc/resolv.conf file. Nice and easy right? Canonical has … Continue reading →

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Is Oracle trying to kill Open Source?

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Steve

Oracle’s decision to suspend test cases and bug history in MySQL could undermine the whole Open Source ecosystem as Enterprise users become wary of poorly supported applications. The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release … Continue reading →

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Delaying attacks on AWS

Posted on October 8, 2012 by David

Because the AWS instances sit behind a load balancer you can’t block by IP on a firewall however you have use the X-FORWARDER-FOR variable in the header. find the IP address you need to block from the relevant apache log … Continue reading →

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What does ISO mean to someone with a server?

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Russ

ForLinux have recently been through and passed its third ISO re-assessment. But what does does this mean for the servers which we host? To start with we have the following in place which directly the effects the way we work … Continue reading →

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Useful Tools for System Administrators Monitoring A Network

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Michael

If you are running a server its always a nice, and usually a good, idea to find out whats using your bandwidth to identify slowness or to find out who on your network is consuming the most. IFTOP Iftop is … Continue reading →

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AWS Consolidated Billing & Tags

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Andy

Do you have multiple client instances setup in a single Amazon account? How can you break down the costs per customer? AWS now provide a way to break your billing down and show usage per instance, this allows you to … Continue reading →

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