Racker Hacker Words of wisdom from a server administrator

Thanks to an e-mail from Joe Calderon, I’ve corrected a MySQLTuner bug where indexes were not being calculated properly when symbolic links are used. It was a quick fix, and the new version is now available for download.
Also, MySQLTuner now has a standardized versioning scheme. I’m starting at 0.8.0 since I’m close to [...]

One of my biggest complaints on RHEL 4 is the large resource usage by the version of SpamAssassin that is installed. When it runs, it uses a ton of CPU time and causes a lot of disk I/O as well. When running top, you may see multiple spamd processes. For a high-volume [...]

One of the questions I receive the most is: “What version of Plesk works with MySQL 5?” The minimum version of Plesk for MySQL 5 is 8.1.0. If you install MySQL 5 on a version prior to 8.1.0, you may be able to access then panel in the other 8.x versions, but your [...]

By setting a certain bash environment variable, you can limit which commands are kept in the .bash_history file. The following options can be passed to the HISTCONTROL environmental variable:
ignorespace – omits commands beginning with a space
ignoredups – omits commands that match the previously run command
ignoreboth – combines ignorespace and ignoredups
erasedups – removes previous lines [...]

Installing new hardware may mean that new kernel need to be loaded when your server boots up. There’s a two step process to making a new initrd file:
First, add the appropriate line to your /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf which corresponds to your new kernel module.
Next, rebuild the initial ram disk after making a backup of [...]