Yonah Russ' Journal

Portsnap, Apache Configurations, and CGI – Questions Answered

Yonah Russ — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:01:24 +0000

Explain the importance of installing and running portsnap after installing a current version of FreeBSD. Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP. The first time [...]

32 or 64 bit MySQL

Yonah Russ — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:22:30 +0000

Recently, I wanted to confirm that I was running the 64 bit version of the MySQL server as opposed to the 32 bit version... one of my admins had made a symlink from the mysql/bin directory to the 64 bit binary directory. On the command line, you could no longer tell if the mysqld command was run from the 64 bit directory and there doesn't seem to be a built in MySQL command which shows what version is currently running (show status, \s, show variables, etc) In the end I ran...

Oracle’s New Line of Sun x86 Servers

Yonah Russ — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:37:02 +0000

Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts: The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be hard to tell if these are worth the pdf's their printed on.

Better User Management for MySQL

Yonah Russ — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:23:42 +0000

If you're like me, you love the granular permissions capabilities of MySQL but hate the work that goes into managing them... Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything like groups in MySQL and according to plans won't be added officially until MySQL 7.0 (WL#988)... While searching around, I found Securich...

Flattr.com – New Micropayment Service Coming

Yonah Russ — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:44:24 +0000

Just saw this on Slashdot. Basically the idea is that you give them a certain amount of money each month which you then use to "flatter" Internet content that you like... While it seems like a good idea, and the domain name it great, I'm not sure there is any market for more "buttons". They should probably try integrating this directly into Twitter, Digg, etc. so if someone retweets, they get a piece of the cake. There are already too many social networks as it is.

Cute Site Based on Google

Yonah Russ — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:10:17 +0000

I just ran into an interesting site goosh.org. Goosh = GOOgle SHell - basically the guy has built a CLI or shell interface to google services....

Google Analytics Showing Strange Statistics

Yonah Russ — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:35:46 +0000

Google Analytics has been showing me weird numbers since the beginning of February. While it is completely possible that these numbers are correct, it is also hard for me to believe. Usually, the traffic looks like a rough bell will low traffic on the weekends. The number of visitors each day is almost exactly the same (103,102,103,104) [...]

Sun Oracle Webcast Wrap Up

Yonah Russ — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:15:05 +0000

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer. Obviously, it is easy to get up and say everything will integrate but doing it is much harder. Just getting past the internal politics of this will be a major issue. Now we can only wait and see if Oracle can pull it off. What I liked, disliked... I used to get upset with "Oracle people" for always thinking that Oracle was the solution to every problem. If they pull off this acquisition, I much just become an "Oracle person" myself.

No ZFS Support for EMC Replication Manager

Yonah Russ — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:43:19 +0000

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups... To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won't change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically EMC has no server-less backup offerings for Solaris with ZFS... If EMC chooses not to support ZFS, they will only force us not to buy EMC arrays. We will stop buying disks, stop buying tools, etc. Instead, they should be providing better support for ZFS, integrating with ZFS to get better performance, providing tools which make EMC the preferred disk array behind a ZFS filesystem.

Making Path Persistent

Yonah Russ — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:17:56 +0000

You can make the executable search PATH variable persistent in several ways:

On the system level you can ...
On a per user level, or for the user root, you can ...