Category: Server

How to open .gz file in Linux/Unix?

You need to use gzip/gunzip program to open/extract a .gz file. It is based on DEFLATE algorithm. All the Linux/Unix comes with default gzip/gunzip program as it is used as primary compression technique in Linux/Unix based system.

How to extract a .gz file?

gunzip yourcompressfile.gz

or

gzip -d yourcompressfile.gz

-d refers to decompress the gzip file.

To view the latest file, type

ls -l

How to extract tar.gz file?

tar.gz files are tar files compressed with gunzip. You can use the tar program in Linux to extract a tar.gz file as following:

tar -xvzf yourfile.tar.gz

Here, x = extract, v = verbose, z = gzip, f = force

If the tar file isn’t compressed with gunzip, then you need to exclude the ‘z’ option which would be as following:

tar -xvf yourfile.tar

A Brilliant App Optimization/Monitoring Tool – New Relic!

Almost 24 hours ago, one of my friend referred to me an interesting offer from ‘tutplus’

http://dev.tutsplus.com/articles/get-a-free-year-of-tuts-premium-by-trying-new-relic–cms-12

It seems Tutplus either affiliated or owned a new App optimization tool named “New Relic”. My primary objective was of course to get the free Tut+ Premium for a year and the Nerd T-shirt, and whats hard in deploying a PHP App Monitoring tool in one of the server! So I started.

The deployment of the tools are fairly easy. I am not really in the Mobile App thing, so I had chosen the PHP Web App monitoring tool. The deployment is well instructed. Its a RPM based installer for RHEL based releases, pretty clean and simple. Once the installation was done, it added a shared object in my PHP interpreter and started grabbing data. Out of a surprise, I started seeing details that are really cool. Things like “Errors” and “Stack Trace” are the finest invention of this tool. The Stack trace gives you reports like “strace” which is my favorite tool of linux debugging facility. The basic advantage of this feature in New Relic is, it saves the data and post you as a token in the dashboard of new relic. Now, isn’t it brilliant? I sorted almost 23 major bugs in client’s account since I have installed the monitor. Database monitoring also includes some exceptional features that are not usually available in App Monitoring/Optimizations tools I had used before.

Unfortunately, the tool is free for 2 weeks. Since then, the “Pro” version comes with 150$ a month per host. The price is certainly high, but the result is truly amazing, looking at the features and performance of the tool.

At the end of all, I had my Tut+ premium for one year for free of charge and a nerd T-shirt on the way to my home 😀

If you haven’t tried it, you can try it now. If you are an android developer, you can add the code in your app, and monitor your App for 14 days for free, and get a Tut+ premium for free for a year.

Just for a record, I am not affiliated with neither Tut+ nor New Relic. The link should not contain any affiliate url.

Happy troubleshooting!

Why are we using Softlayer Nameservers?

I was reviewing the live chat transcripts earlier today. An interesting one that was served by “Ronskit”, a live chat operator of Mellowhost caught my attention. One of our visitor was interested to know, why are we using Softlayer nameservers for the domain “mellowhost.com” (http://intodns.com/mellowhost.com) instead of ns1.mellowhost.com or so on. The visitor was more interested in proving that Mellowhost is hosted in a shared server and all of our clients are also using a server that is not really managed by Mellowhost. His excuses were flowing towards why we don’t sell VPS or Master Resellers, or so called “Alpha” Master Resellers instead we only sell Reseller and Shared Hosting. It is eventually hard to answer a management level of query by a sales representative and as expected he wasn’t able to please the visitor 🙂 I quickly thought to write this down for future references.

 

Continue reading “Why are we using Softlayer Nameservers?”

Experience with Varnish!

When Mellowhost first launched her servers, all of them were using “DSO” module for serving php. I can remember, one of the most commonly used caching plugin was either Eaccelerator or Xcache. Eaccelerator was preferable as cpanel Easyapache have this in their option and can be compiled automatically while rebuilding apache. As time passed, we had to choose suphp instead of dso due to many factors involved. I hope to write them down at later time why we had to move to suphp. But that actually cut the idea of using dynamic cacher in the server. Suphp kills the php process after serving, this allows all the opcode cacher to be valueless. Due to cutting off a dynamic cacher, the server started showing pretty good load average. Although it was a good trade off of IO and CPU usage in cost of security. I was searching for a cacher that would work with suphp in the same technique Litespeed (A paid web server software) does.

Continue reading “Experience with Varnish!”

wp-supercache plugin for MH servers

I had written about using a cache plugin with all the wordpress blogs in order to reduce the CPU usage before. Although, some of our clients were complaining about issues with the most popular “wp-supercache” plugin with couple of our servers. We use some custom security protection which might block couple of wp-supercache commands. I here therefore, uploaded a workable version of  latest wp-supercache 0.9.9.9 that works perfectly with our servers. You can download the latest version of wp-supercache compatible with our servers here:

http://mellowhost.com/downloads/wp-supercache.tar.gz

Wp-supercache is a property of its original author. More details about this plugin is available here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

48 restless hours!

RAID is not a backup solution, it is proved again! I was planning to write my experience of 48 hours from July 22 7:17 to July 24 7:23 GMT -5, couldn’t really manage to get some time. All the users who were in the Hemonto server should be aware about the recent issue we faced with our RAID. This post is just to elaborate how did we handle the situation.

Continue reading “48 restless hours!”

Some good budget servers!

We use Softlayer and Liquidweb for all of our production servers. None of them is really a budget server provider. Softlayer does sell some budget servers which are not at all good for production servers planned for web hosting services due to their inability to upgrade in future (Like xpress servers). Moreover the price isn’t really right for the same set of hardwares with some other budget provider. We have been using budget servers for our backup servers which usually can hold tons of TBs of data.

Continue reading “Some good budget servers!”