Racker Hacker Words of wisdom from a server administrator

MySQL replication may sound complicated, but it can be done easily. Here’s a quick 7-step guide:
1) Create a replication user on the master:
mysql> GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO ‘repl’@'%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
2) On the master server, add the following to the [mysqld] section in my.cnf and restart MySQL:
server-id = 1
relay_log=mysqldrelay
log-bin
expire_logs_days = 7
3) On [...]

I’m taking a little bit of time off for Christmas, but I’ll be adding new posts on December 31st. I wish all of you a happy holiday season, and if you celebrate Christmas, a Merry Christmas as well!

I had some time to do some testing of my blog’s performance today, and I discovered how much of a difference the WP-Cache plugin makes.
This blog runs on a server with dual Xeon Woodcrest CPU’s, 64-bit CentOS 4.5 and a 100mbit network connection. Here’s the first test with WP-Cache turned off:
$ http_load -parallel 10 [...]

I spoke to a customer recently who was concerned about their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 server and its Red Hat support status. After some digging, I found these items on Red Hat’s security site:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 5)
End of Full Support: Mar 31, 2010
End of Maintenance Support: Mar 31, 2014
Red Hat Enterprise [...]

I stumbled upon a server running Plesk 8.2.1 where a certain user could not receive e-mail. I sent an e-mail to the user from my mail client, and I never saw it enter the user’s mailbox. It didn’t even appear in the logs.
After checking the usual suspects, like MX records, mail account configuration, [...]