setup

RightScale provides all kinds of things — from a pre-configured MySQL master-slave setup (with automatic EBS/s3 backups), to a full LAMP stack, Rails app servers, virtually all kinds of other pre-configured server templates to a nifty auto-scaling feature. We decided to leverage RightScale when we planned our move to AWS a couple months ago in order to not have to build everything ourselves. I’ve been writing this blog entry for the past five weeks and here are some observations, thoughts and tips....

Frequently, you do client work and if you are fortunate enough, you can setup a development environment on your own server or your laptop (or whatever), tinker with the files, and templates, and so on — until it’s all done. And whenever you are done, it’s time to move files. Sounds easy? It sort of is! Checklist Here’s a small check list of things to keep in mind when you move an installation....

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....

Thanks to Wesley, we recently managed to update CouchDB’s FreeBSD port to the official 0.9.0 release. My current TODO for the port includes: a super-cool rc-script (currently, there is none) automatic user setup/creation (couchdb) patching of the install/source to use BSD-style directories for the database (e.g. /var/db/couchdb). In regard to the the rc-script, I continued on a work in progress and committed an idea on Github. This work in process (couchdb) works out of the box....

I bought a Drobo for myself about seven months ago and I couldn’t be any happier. My files are backed up on a RAID system, I still got plenty of space to waste. My world is OK. Some friends of mine recently bought one of the new Drobo units with a DroboShare. The DroboShare costs $200 (USD) and is a glorified Linux server which exports your Drobo using Samba to all clients on the network....