Aug 11

Source: Redmine.org

For those of you who are running Redmine on Phusion Passenger, if you have certain versions of the RedCloth gem installed, you are in for some trouble.
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Aug 11

Updated my web server with Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20080810 and Phusion Passenger 2.0.3 successfully. Both releases feature bugfixes for security issues and the like. My web server currently powers this blog, a Redmine instance for my own projects, and some “production” servers for a few Rails apps I’m writing right now.

I’d highly recommend Passenger and RubyEnt for low-volume or even high-traffic production Rails servers. It has greatly simplified my deployment and performance on a VPS with, say, 540MB of RAM is stellar. If you set the idle timeout to something huge, you can get almost Nginx+Mongrel/Thin level performance even on a low-traffic server; otherwise you have to wait a brief time (10-15 seconds) when the app has been idle for a while.

Jul 14

Source: Tibs’ Blog

I had been having a lot of trouble using libxml-ruby on Ubuntu Hardy for a hobby project of mine. Any task including libxml calls via require 'xml/libxml' fails with the message:
no such file to load -- libxml_so. Read the rest of this entry »

Jun 25

This morning, as a result of a hardware failure on my home server, I decided to move my Redmine devtracker to my Linode host. Read the rest of this entry »

May 27

If, like me, you’ve built your Ubuntu machine using LVM for all partitions except /boot, you can do a live backup of your system using LVM snapshots and the dump tool. Read the rest of this entry »

Apr 24

If you, like me, use sysv-rc-conf to change the services that run a particular runlevel, i.e. so that runlevel 2 is actually only networked and not GUI as tradition holds, you can set the default runlevel to boot in Ubuntu by editing:

/etc/inittab:
id:3:initdefault

The number in the middle is the runlevel to start by default.

Apr 14

My SFF server machine has been configured to speed up my digital life. Read the rest of this entry »

Apr 14

In order for me to use the official binary drivers, version 169.12, from NVidia with my GeForce 8800GT on Ubuntu Gutsy, I had to do some research. Alberto Milone’s envy tool makes the whole thing almost idiot-proof.
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Apr 10

My desktop just grew by two 500GB Western Digital Caviar drives. Having installed those, I loaded Gutsy-AMD64 on one using LVM. The partition schema is as follows:

Drive: 500GB #1
Volume Group: server1
Volumes:
	swap_1 - 6GB - swap
	root_1 - 30GB - ext3 - mounted as /
	home_1 - 20GB - ext3 - mounted as /home/
Free space: ~398GB

500GB number two will probably wind up being a RAID mirror via my motherboard. This LVM layout allows me to dynamically allocate space for the many potential Xen DomUs I create.

To install Xen on Gutsy-AMD64 desktop version:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xen-desktop-amd64

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Apr 7

On my home server I’m toying with some Rails clustering and such, using nginx and thin, and now God to watch over things.
With this setup, I can add apps and port-ranges to monitor any time I like, and I can split off a particularly specific configuration group if an app has unusual trends or requirements, such as using loads of memory.
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