Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015
Three months ago, we were introduced to the wonders of Ansible at Drupal Camp Brighton. Since then, whenever we’ve had the chance we’ve been working on various Ansible playbooks to automate many of our development and maintenance processes.
For a small team like us, Ansible is invaluable. It is reducing the time we need to spend administering our servers and sites exponentially, freeing up extra time for development.
Development and testing happen more quickly as well, and we can be more confident about deployment to live running smoothly because of better consistency between our environments. ...
Tuesday, Feb 3, 2015
Alongside developing lots of different websites in Drupal, we also maintain and administer a number of different servers. In this role we occasionally end up managing a number of different domain names. It struck us as interesting that many people don’t really understand the difference between using the domain with or without www, for example www.willhallonline.co.uk and willhallonline.co.uk. They are technically two different subdomains of willhallonline.co.uk, however, it has to be stressed that they are different. ...
Monday, Jan 19, 2015
We ran into this error PHP Warning: Error while sending QUERY packet. PID=25016 the other day when trying to run an update query on a database with approximately 3.8 million records in it. New data had become available for 2.1 million of these records.
These were submitted using a PHP program which fetched and parsed enormous CSV files before using a PDO statement to insert or update the records into MySQL. ...
Wednesday, Dec 5, 2012
There are lots of details online about how to create and edit web pages/sites and how to make things look pretty, however, there is a lot less about how to get things working nicely on servers be them development or live servers. Of course, hosting websites is maybe not something for everyone and certainly at Will Hall Online, my usual response may well be to get a server to run your website but if you are running a small website, with limited resource requirements, shared hosting can do a fantastic job. ...
Thursday, Nov 8, 2012
Recently I have been doing quite a few more system administrator tasks around different office. I wrote this bash script (I realise it is probably not perfect to bash officianados, however, it does solve that problem). I have attached the completed file below if you want to download it.
Bash Code #!/bin/bash # get all users whose uid is greater than 1000 and less than 60000 for user in `awk -F':' '{if ($3 > 1000 && $3 < 60000) print $1}' /etc/passwd` do # create array as output from quota command array=( $(quota -v $user)) # retrieve amount of space user is using block=${array[17]} #retrieve quota that user is allowed quota=${array[18]} # result = quota - amount used result=$(($quota-$block)) # if result is less than 20000 then do something. ...
Friday, Dec 31, 2010
After the recent period of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on sites which appear to have been linked to Wikileaks; PayPal, Mastercard, Amazon etc. A question arose to me. Is there any way that a business can prevent themselves from being vunerable to DDoS attacks.
Now to define a DDoS attack. Wikipedia defines it as “an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users” (DoS Wiki). To use an analogy, if we think of a server as a plughole in a sink. ...
Monday, Jul 12, 2010
Getting in the right server for your business; one that will be capable of managing all of your requests and give you space to grow without costing the earth or having a facebook like amount of servers is a tricky bit of business. Here is a quick overview of differing servers and their benefits and disadvantages.
VPS (Virtual Private Servers) Are servers located on a virtual environment within a host machine. ...
Thursday, Apr 22, 2010
Choosing the right server for your drupal site can be a difficult process. What specifications do you need, what about connections/ftp/ssh host reliability and such like? With the plethora or hosting packages available on the internet, probably 10,000+ it can be tricky deciding on what may be best for your site. Here are a few pointers that I think about when choosing hosting/servers.
What is the expectations of your hosting provider? ...
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