Racker Hacker Words of wisdom from a server administrator

I’ve just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.6.1.  If you haven’t upgraded yours, you may want to get started. You can review the changelog as well.

I’ve used this extremely basic procmail configuration a million times, and it’s a great start for any server configuration. It passes e-mails through spamassassin (if they’re smaller than 256KB) and then filters any e-mail marked as spam to /dev/null:
LOGFILE=/var/log/procmail.log
DROPPRIVS=yes
:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamc
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
/dev/null
Of course, you can make this much more complicated with some additional customization.

It’s moments like these that make me proud to be a Racker! In just a year and a half that I’ve been there, I’ve seen a lot of great changes and this one is the best. Congratulations to RAX!

If you have Plesk 8.1 or later, you have support available for Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, clicking the FastCGI checkbox in Plesk won’t get you all of the support you need (and expect). The folks over at Parallels created a relatively simple process to get Ruby on Rails working properly on your site:
Go [...]

Many applications that are used on a standard server perform quite a few of small writes to the disk (like MySQL or Apache). These writes can pile up and limit the performance of your applications. If you have kernel 2.6.9 or later, you can adjust how these small writes are handled to allow [...]