Category: Open Source Software

Nginx does not have the concept of virtual host like Apache does — nginx refers to the apache virtual host as the server. To log the requested host with each request, which makes troubleshooting when multiple sites are hosted on the same instance much easier, use the following format: log_format main ‘$remote_addr $host $remote_user [$time_local]…

I was recently working on a data load where I wanted to convert one column from an epoch time format into a timestamp column on import. I couldn’t figure out why the timestamp was being set to the current time on every test, no matter what I set the variables/values to. I initially tried with…

A common task is to rewrite HTTP requests to HTTPS to secure communication. Using nginx, this is easily done with: # use only https if ($scheme = http) { rewrite ^ https://$host$uri permanent; } This should be placed in a server block.

I recently ordered a GlobalScale D2Plug (makers of the SheevaPlug) and needed to be able to hook up a serial device via USB. The only problem was that the installed kernel did not have the proper modules available, namely pl2303 and ftdi_sio. Although this unit was shipped running Ubuntu 10.04, performing software updates via aptitude…

A common problem with cloud storage of files is that many restrict the filesize to make things more manageable. A good way to solve this problem is to use split to reduce the filesize and create multiple smaller files from a large archive. There are two primary use cases – note that these commands split…

When installing Splunk on a server with existing applications and Apache already setup and running, it’s easy to add support for Splunk via mod_proxy. Although I believe it’s best to use virtual hosts to split out applications and setup proper DNS, in this example, I will be using the default virtual host (or none at…

This is great news! One of the headaches of managing any file/object store is pruning old data, although that is something we’ve all dealt with for years with standard filesystems and storage devices, this makes working in the cloud easier. It’s applied by policy to a bucket (without versioning enabled). Check it out in the…

A common task when working with MySQL is to enable binary logging which will allow you to add read only slaves (often a good idea even if you aren’t adding the replication slaves now). According to the official MySQL documentation, there are only 3 steps required to enable binary logging: assign a unique server-id to…