Ubuntu: setting up redis-server (reloaded)

I blogged about setting up redis before, here’s a small update to the situation: If you’re running Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04.x, the most recent release available through aptitude is 1.x. Version 1.x doesn’t include many things (pubsub, etc.) which are available in 2.x. So this leaves you with two options! Compile! Compiling redis-server is simple (aka, make && sudo make install), a few things were missing (last time I checked):...

November 28, 2011 · 2 min

nginx configuration gotchas

After running away screaming from Zend_XmlRpc we migrated of our internal webservices are RESTful nowadays — which implies that we make heavy use of HTTP status codes and so on. On the PHP side of things we implemented almost all of those webservices using the Zend Framework where some parts are replaced by in-house replacements (mostly stripped-down and optimized versions equivalents of Zend_Foo) and a couple nifty PEAR packages. RESTful — how does it work?...

April 5, 2011 · 3 min

Giganews VPN on Ubuntu

This article briefly describes how you can setup the Giganews VPN (PPTP) on Ubuntu. I’m gonna assume 10.04 (that’s what I tested with) and the gnome desktop. Does this sound familiar: The VPN connection ‘xxxxx’ failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. If so then I’m hoping this article will help you. What is a VPN for? The use-case for a VPN — and this is for basically any VPN (not just Giganews’ service) — is security....

February 20, 2011 · 1 min

EC2 security group owner ID

I recently had the pleasure to setup an RDS instance and it took me a while to figure out what the --ec2-security-group-owner-id parameter needs to be populated with when you want to allow access to your RDS instance from instances with a certain security group. To cut to the chase, you need to log into AWS and then click the following link — done.

May 9, 2010 · 1 min

A toolchain for CouchDB Lounge

One of our biggest issues with CouchDB is currently the lack of compaction of our database, and by lack of, I don’t mean that CouchDB doesn’t support it, I mean that we are unable to actually run it. Compaction in a nutshell Compaction in a nutshell is pretty cool. As you know, CouchDB is not very space-efficient. For once, CouchDB saves revisions of all documents. Which means, whenever you update a document a new revision is saved....

February 26, 2010 · 2 min