Category Archives: Systems Administration

Issue and solution for upgrading Lighttpd from 1.4.8 to 1.4.11

Posted on March 25, 2006 by Todd Huss

After upgrading Lighttpd to 1.4.11 from 1.4.8 it was no longer working with my Ruby on Rails project saying it couldn’t find public/dispatch.fcgi. Well, it turns out they made this security fix which breaks relative paths typically used in lighttpd.conf:

Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration, Web | 7 Comments

Scaling a medium sized website

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Todd Huss

Eric Hodel posted their production website server setup over at the Robot Coop that handled 2.5M page views in a day not too long ago. I love this kind of information because it helps me get a feel for how … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration, Web | 1 Comment

More powerful database constraints with regular expressions

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Todd Huss

Is it just me or do you agree that we should be able to easily apply regular expression constraints to a column in a table without writing a stored procedure? For example if I want to guarantee that a varchar … Continue reading →

Posted in Database, Software Engineering, Systems Administration | Comments Off on More powerful database constraints with regular expressions

The time has come to upgrade to MySQL 5

Posted on January 13, 2006 by Todd Huss

We’ve finally hit the point at work where we’re ready to upgrade from MySQL 4.0 to 5. Data integrity has been a problem since I started at this job. Part of the reason is that MySQL 4.0 has an odd … Continue reading →

Posted in Database, Software Engineering, Systems Administration | Comments Off on The time has come to upgrade to MySQL 5

Google Analytics, if you’re not using it you should be

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’ve been using Google Analytics for about a month to track 4 of my sites (and more recently this one as well) and I am impressed! The key (in my mind) to Google Analytics and other high end commerical solutions … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Systems Administration, Web | 4 Comments

Blogging software

Posted on January 7, 2006 by Todd Huss

In moving from my old blog at JRoller to one on my domain I had to choose which blogging engine to use. After evaluating a number of systems such as Movable Type, Typo, Blogger with sftp, etc… I ended up … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration, Web | 9 Comments

Linux distribution choices tell a lot about a person

Posted on January 2, 2006 by Todd Huss

My first Linux distribution was Slackware installed from 40 floppy disks running the 0.99 Linux kernel. Back then a distribution was just a starting point to get a system up and running. The concept of upgrading to the next release … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off on Linux distribution choices tell a lot about a person

Drupal on Windows with IIS installation problem and solution

Posted on December 26, 2005 by Todd Huss

I’ve been looking at redoing my website boatblogger.com using Drupal instead of the Roller weblogger. Most of the users that started using boatblogger found roller a little to frustrating and eventually left for the bigger free blogging services. I’m also … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off on Drupal on Windows with IIS installation problem and solution

Defrag in Windows in safe mode

Posted on December 24, 2005 by Todd Huss

I’ve discovered that the only way to really get a good defrag in Windows is in safe mode. Reboot Windows, hit F8 before the starting Windows screen comes up, select safe mode, and then Start -> Accessories -> System Tools … Continue reading →

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Backup/restore compact flash cards with Windows and Cygwin

Posted on July 18, 2005 by Todd Huss

In one of my side-ventures, which I’ve written about before, we develop and sell Linux and Java based nmea wireless navigation servers for the marine market. The devices run a small embedded Linux distribution on compact flash so we regularly … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration | 3 Comments