installation

Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....

This is a quick and dirty rundown on how to install Varnish 2.1.x on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS). Get sources setup Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list: Import the key for the new repository: Installation Update sources list and install varnish: Files of importance: Double-check: Further reading I recommend a mix of the following websites/links: Varnish 2.1 documentation Wiki with lots of tutorials and examples Team Soundcloud’s varnishtop (code on Github) Fin That’s all!...

I updated my mother’s Mac Mini from Tiger to Snow Leopard last night and I did not enounter many issues during the one-hour-long installation (or update) process. In advance — in order to be save than sorry — we had bought an external hard drive and did a backup of her home folder (6 GB — I wish my own backup was that size ;-)). The one thing I ran into was that after the installation finished, I tried to reconnect to our wifi — but if failed....

So, every once in a while I find myself in need of trying out newer, maybe, not-yet-released features in PHP. For example, recently, I wanted to test RoundCube PHP6 — this is how I did it. On a side note, the same setup would also work for testing code with previous versions of PHP. Toolbox I used nginx and the PHP source with a little bit of ./configure and make — for kicks!...

Since part one and two were uber-successful, here’s an update on my Zend Framework PHP performance situation. I’ve also had this post sitting around since beginning of May and I figured if I don’t post it now, I never will. Disclaimer: All numbers (aka pseudo benchmarks) were not taken on a full moon and are (of course) very relative to our server hardware (e.g. DELL 1950, 8 GB RAM) and environment....