Archive for category Sysadmin
Cheaping out on EC2 – using Spot Instances
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin, Uncategorized on September 1, 2012
Amazon markets Spot Instances as a way to reduce the price you pay for instances. So, continuing my efforts to reduce expenses on EC2, I looked into using spot instances. Spot instances are essentially just like normal instances. You can create your own AMIs, where you essentially create an image and tell Amazon to create […]
nginx testing
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on August 27, 2012
As part of my web optimization interest, I’ve been looking into alternatives & add-ons for the traditional LAMP stack. The most obvious thing I’ve found is replacing Apache with Lighttpd or nginx. nginx seems to be more updated (based on what I’m remembering of a cursory web search a while ago), so I’m focusing my […]
Rebuilding a partition table after failed resize
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on August 27, 2012
So. When I decommissioned my NAS, I moved stuff off the drives incrementally. My RAID5 media partitions were the first to get nuked, and I reformatted that partition on one of the drives as an NTFS partition, for use on my desktop. I then moved my pictures off the RAID 6 onto that NTFS partition, […]
Cheap hosting
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on August 27, 2012
I’ve perpetually been on the lookout for cheap hosting. Price’s the reason I’ve been hosting my stuff with Dreamhost for the past few years (going on 6 years!), and is the reason I’m going to be taking advantage of MaxCDN’s ‘free’ 1TB of CDN bandwidth this week. (Reasoing being that I don’t have much use […]
I’m annoyed at Crashplan now
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on July 31, 2012
I’ve been using crashplan for the last 10 months – the combination of low price, family pack of 10 computers and Windows & Linux support means it beat out BackBlaze for my online backup of choice. However, I’ve run into multiple problems with it, all in one day.
Plesk, Updating CentOS & sftp-server
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on July 6, 2012
tl;dr – Either a plesk update or CentOS update borked an OpenSSHd install such that the sshd_config was pointing to an sftp-server that didn’t exist where it was looking for it, but existed in two other locations. Fix was to update the sshd_config while investigating the possibility of removing the duplicate install.
Cheaping out on EC2 – Downsizing existing EBS volumes
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Linux, Sysadmin on June 6, 2012
I’m moving a VM from my own server to EC2. I’ve got $50 worth of credit from a Redhat event, so I would like to make use of that. (That, and my AWS account existed before the free tier was introduced, so I’m not eligible for that.) That said, I want to make that credit […]
Google Apps, multiple domains, and other related things
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Sysadmin on June 2, 2012
I’ve decided to actually get around to creating a portfolio site. Bought the domain, but have done… nothing. Oops. First off, email and DNS takes time to propagate, so I decided to get Google Apps set up with that domain to be able to send & receive email from that domain. But I had decisions […]
You know you need more RAM when…
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on May 10, 2012
aka, my errors, let me show you them. or, inadvertent DDoSes are fun when you do them to yourself! finally, A: “I can see 4GB of RAM but I can only use 1.5.” Q: What is “Why I loathe 1and1”? sudo -i sudo: unknown uid: 10003 sudo: cannot fork: Cannot allocate memory -bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument […]
3 things about backups
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Sysadmin on May 5, 2012
In this post I’ll talk about 3 things about backups that you should know. At the end of it, you should understand the different types of data involved in a backup, and some programs which can help you with the backups. 3 different types of data (Or, why not all data is equal) Data can […]