1. Alternative PHP Cache (APC)

APC is a PHP accelerator which boosts the performance of your PHP scripts. If you are not using it already you should really do so. It works very nice out of the box with default settings.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install php5-apc

or:

$ sudo pecl install apc

Configuration

Add the following section to your php.ini-file.

[apc]
extension = apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 30
apc.stat = 1

Note: You need to restart Apache in order to load this new extension.

How much memory to allocate for APC is defined by apc.shm_size (default is 30M).

apc.stat = 1 forces APC to check if the PHP-file has been modified upon each request. On a production server where your files rarely change you can achieve a significant performance boost by having this feature turned off. In that case you’ll either need to restart the web server or clear the cache manually when updating files.

Learn more

• APC Manual
• APC at Facebook
• PHP Performance with APC + memcached

2. DenyHosts

Denyhosts let you protect your server against SSH brute force attacks. If you have a public web server and have a look at your SSH log file (in example /var/log/auth.log on Ubuntu) you’ll be amazed how many attackers that want to gain access to your server. Denyhosts address this problem by rejecting access to the server after a certain number of failed login attempts (defaults to 1 for root, 5 for invalid user accounts and 10 for valid user accounts).

Attackers IP-address will be appended to /etc/hosts.deny and will be rejected instantly upon trying to attacking your server again.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install denyhosts

Configuration

Default settings are mostly fine. You can configure your DenyHosts setup in /etc/denyhosts.conf.

3. rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a simple backup tools which create rotated backups of local or remote files and directories. rsnapshot is built on top of OpenSSH for secure transfer and rsync for synchronizing directories contents without using excessive bandwidth. The disk space required is just a little more than the space of one full backup, plus incrementals.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install rsnapshot

Configuration

Once installed you should edit /etc/rsnapshot.conf and configure which files and directories you want to backup.

For local files use:

# localhost
backup /home/          localhost/
backup /etc/           localhost/
backup /usr/local/     localhost/

For remote files use:

# example.org
backup  root@example.org:/home/		hostname/
backup  root@example.org:/etc/		hostname/
backup  root@example.org:/usr/local/bin/   hostname/

For remote backups you need to setup a password-less SSH login between the backup server and the remote server.

Note: You need to use TAB for spaces and trailing “/” for directories (skipping trailing slash and rsnapshot will treat it as a file).

For more information about setting up rsnapshot on your server check out this guide.

4. Munin

Munin is a simple resource monitoring tool that help you analyze trends on your resource usage. It comes with many useful graphs out of the box and is easy to install additional graphs or even write your own graphs.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install munin

Configuration

You don’t need to configure anything here if you are just running munin locally. If you want to run Munin for multiple servers read this guide.

Learn more

You can find additional plugins here and a tutorial on how to write your own plugins here.

5. Logwatch

Logwatch analyse your system log files and create a report on areas where you should pay attention. It’s easy to use and work well with default settings on most systems.

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install logwatch

Configuration

In order to receive email reports from Logwatch you should edit /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf. Here’s an example:

MailTo = your.email@example.org
MailFrom = logwatch@example.org
Range = Yesterday
Detail = Med
mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"
Service = all

With this setup you’ll receive a daily email of yesterday’s activity with a medium severity which is an ok start. For more information on how to configure Logwatch click here.

Topic’s covered in the PHP room:

• The Cake is a lie (by Sebastian Bergmann)
• Advanced Date/Time handling with PHP (by Derick Rethans)
• The power of mysqlnd plugins (by Ulf Wendel)
• Working with Web Services (by Lorna Mitchell)
• Utilizing and building the Semantic Web with PHP (by Christian Weiske)
• HTML to ODT to XML to PDF to … (by Tobias Schlitt)
• Understanding Software Metrics (by Manuel Pichler)

The Cake is a lie

by Sebastian Bergmann (@s_bergmann)

In this talk Sebastian Bergmann covered some basic knowledge prior to choosing a framework. This session included his skeptical view on frameworks like CakePHP and Symfony which utilize scaffolding for easier development and and faster time-to-market. Even though scaffolding is nice in some ways it can lead to maintainability and scalability issues.

› View slides: The Cake is a lie

Advanced Date/Time handling with PHP

by Derick Rethans (@derickr)

Derick Rethans covered a lot of goodies when it comes to Date/Time handling in PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3. Derick has also written a book on this topic which we strongly recommend: “php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming“.

› View slides: Advanced Date/Time handling with PHP

The power of mysqlnd plugins

by Ulf Wendel (@Ulf_Wendel)

MySQL Native Driver (alias mysqlnd) is a C library which implements the MySQL Client Server Protocol and is a drop in replacement for the good old MySQL Client Library (alias libmysqlclient). mysqlnd is part of PHP 5.3 and doesn’t expose any userland function, but rather work as an internal API for ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and ext/PDO.

In this talk Ulf Wendel covered how you can write your own mysqlnd plugins in PHP, which can be used in many creative ways.

› View slides: The power of mysqlnd plugins

Utilizing and building the Semantic Web with PHP

by Christian Weiske

Discusses various standards, tools and libraries for how to deal with semantics.

› View slides: Utilizing and building the Semantic Web with PHP

Working with Web Services

by Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane)

A good overview of how to work with web services with PHP. Covers both REST (JSON/XML) and SOAP.

HTML to ODT to XML to PDF to …

by Tobias Schlitt

› View slides: HTML to ODT to XML to PDF to …

Understanding Software Metrics

by Manuel Pichler (@manuelp)

› View slides: Understanding Software Metrics (in German)