Out of Control®

Today, for the first time on one of our servers, I was unable to restart Apache. Running a configtest showed no errors, so something else was up. Looking in the Apache error logs, there was a line: "No space left on device: Cannot create SSLMutex". If you ever get this, chances are you are suffering [...]

I needed the pecl package geoip installed on one of my RHEL5 servers running PHP 5. This is an easy task but you might get a slightly confusing error which will stop you. First off there are two ways to install a PECL package. First is to simply issue a pecl command at the prompt: [...]

Last week I did a short post on testing MailScanner to be sure it was scanning properly. An alert reader pointed out that I missed the easy solution, which was to simply use 'MailScanner --lint' to check if MailScanner was running properly. Since I wrote that article, I found that my MailScanner was again hogging [...]

I noticed on one server today a huge CPU load. A quick look at Netstat showed that most of the current traffic was coming from someone in Africa. I crossed referenced the IP address from Netstat with the access log files on the various sites on the server and saw that it had a UserAgent [...]

We are finally getting around to moving our Out of Control™ website to ExpressionEngine. WordPress for us just has too many security updates, and the recent massive change to the control panel just isn't too our liking. We also find that after much tweaking and optimizing, one of our larger sites FindMacStuff is still just [...]

If you have followed my story over the past few months, you will know that I got out of hosting. This has been an excellent move over all as it frees up a lot of my time to do what I like best, develope websites and tinker. As I have a fair number of sites [...]

This week we had to resolve an issue with Subversion on RHEL5. We use post-commit hooks to have external directories get an auto-update from the repository everytime someone check-in a file or update. This all worked fine on RHEL4 using sudoers. On RHEL5 we were getting Authentication failures each time we tried. Turns out that [...]

This morning I discovered that a drive on one of my machines was in read only mode. So I figured the easiest way to resolve the issue is to unmount the drive and re-mount it again. When I tried to umount the drive I got this error: PLAIN TEXT CODE: # umount /mnt/sdb umount: /mnt/sdb: [...]

Today a client wanted to track file downloads. Sure I told them, easy with Urchin, which they happen to have installed already. No, no, no they told me, it's broken, it is giving bogus download numbers. Sure enough when I took a look, the numbers Urchin was reporting were way too high. The numbers being [...]

The more I know how my server is feeling, the better off I am. Using apache’s built in Server Status is just one such tool that will let you see how apache is handling it’s load. The server status will tell you the server load, uptime, requests per second, total workers, available workers, and every [...]