Rebate Rip-offs
December 7, 2006 by Jason · 3 Comments
One of the people I work with, Dave (yes, the same Dave who got the tattoo in Las Vegas), recently made a post on his site about all of the cheap stuff he's bought recently with mail-in rebates. He wrote that out of the 5 rebates he's been waiting for, he's received one. Well, Dave, you're not alone.
In general, I try to avoid buying items that come with mail-in rebates. They really only comprise a small portion of my purchases, maybe 10% at most. The reason is that the odds of someone actually receiving a mail-in rebate on a tech product are pretty low these days. For example, in the past year, I have ordered 2GB of OCZ DDR memory ($40 MIR), a PNY GeForce 6600GT PCI-E video card ($20 MIR), two 1GB SanDisk USB Sticks ($10 MIR each), and a Cuisinart Coffee Maker w/ Built-In Grinder ($20 MIR). Out of those rebates, the most recent of which was filed about 8 weeks ago, I have received exactly $0.00. That's $100 that I'm owed that I will, in all likelihood, never receive.
Upgrading to MySQL 5.0.27 on RHEL and CentOS
December 5, 2006 by Jason · 23 Comments
One of the most common technical recommendations given on the vbulletin.com forums is to upgrade your software versions to the newest available. I've already covered how to upgrade Apache's httpd and PHP so now I'm going to explain how to upgrade your RHEL/CentOS 4 system to use MySQL 5.0.27. This is not a terribly difficult process but it is VERY time consuming. Expect to spend about 10 minutes prepping and about an hour compiling (even on a high-end box).
To start, you'll need three things. First, you're going to need 'root' access to your server. If you don't have it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, on most machines, you'll need to install a huge list of dependencies. Finally, you'll need the MySQL src.rpm from FC7's development tree.
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Build Your Own Home/SOHO NAS
December 4, 2006 by Jason · 20 Comments
If you're like me, you're probably got more than one computer at home. In fact, if you're like me, you've probably got a half-dozen or so. Wait, that's still not quite right, let me try one more time... If you're like me, you've got a half-dozen computers at home, running a few different operating systems, and you use them all. Yeah, that one's right.
If so, you will, no doubt, have run into the nasty little problem of keeping your files synchronized. If you keep a copy of everything on every machine then that's a huge waste of space. If you don't, you no doubt will need something from a machine that you can't easily access. You've probably thought about setting up a file server but the thought of dishing out $200 (plus hardware) for a copy of Windows isn't really appealing, nor is the thought of taking an old box lying around and installing Linux on it. Luckily, there is a solution that lies half-way in the middle. Its name is OpenFiler.
Upgrading to PHP 5.2.0 on RHEL and CentOS
November 30, 2006 by Jason · 47 Comments
With the release of an src.rpm for PHP 5.2.0 in the Fedora Core 7 development branch, I've decided to roll out PHP 5.2.0 as a test on a couple of our smaller forums that are running vBulletin 3.6.4. According to the changelog, PHP 5.2.0 has an improved memory-management system. With any luck it'll be faster than 5.1.6 and won't break anything in the process.
The procedure to build the PHP 5.2.0 RPMs for RHEL and CentOS 4 is almost identical to the one I used to install PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL and CentOS 4 so this is going to read very similarly to the original how-to. In fact, I recommend reading that post as well before you begin.
One quick warning though, PHP 5.2.0 is currently the bleeding-edge release. I do not recommend that you install it on your production servers without first testing on a development box to make sure that your applications still work as expected. I would also recommend that you build the PHP 5.1.6 RPMs as well, that way you can easily roll back if needed.
To start, you'll need three things. First, you're going to need 'root' access to your server. If you don't have it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, on most machines, you'll need to install a huge list of dependencies. Finally, you'll need the PHP src.rpm from FC7's development tree.
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Drunken Videos from PubCon 2006
November 29, 2006 by Jason · 4 Comments
As promised in my PubCon 2006 Night Life post, I've got a bunch of videos from Thursday evening. All of the videos I've got so far are from Amanda. Andrew's content is stuck on his phone because he lost his USB transfer cable.
The videos have been recompressed using DivX (with MP3 audio) so they should be playable on almost every computer. That also had the wonderful side effect of reducing the total file size from 585MB to 54MB. In any case, getting to what you're here for... The videos!
Picking the Right Web Host
November 28, 2006 by Jason · 7 Comments
One of the first things that comes to mind when starting a new web site is "Where will I put it?" This question is easily answered in the beginning as there are thousands of cheap (and occasionally free) web hosts available that will allow you to run a small web site. As time goes on, however, it gets quite a bit more interesting as you try to find a hosting method that will suit your site but not empty your wallet.
At current, there are three main types of hosting available: shared hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated servers. The big question is "When is it appropriate to move from one to the next?" Most people answer that question with something like, "When my site is running slowly" or, "When my host asks me to leave." Both of these answers, unfortunately, will leave you in a bad way and may cause you to lose valuable traffic. The good news is that proper planning and research upfront can really cut down on the headaches later.
AdSense IS Content
When was the last time you saw a web site that wasn't selling something? Can't think of one? Neither can I. Every site I've been to in the recent past has either been directly selling a product, offering to trade something you have for something less valuable that they have, or showing you advertisements (either fixed or adsense).
My first thought on the recent overabundance of advertisements was "When the hell did everyone get so greedy?" At what point, did content get bumped to second-place behind ads? At what point did we start to not only tolerate ad-filled sites, but to accept them as the norm? That thought, of course, was followed by "Damn... I've got to get that ad-blocker plugin for Firefox..."
As a server administrator (that's part of my day job), I know that hosting is expensive. I know that shared hosting rarely works out once you've got enough visitors coming to your site to pay for it. I know that Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are overpriced and often perform worse than the cheaper shared hosting does. I know that dedicated server hosting generally means that you either need to be a server admin yourself, or that you've got to dish out a few hundred dollars per month to hire someone to do the work. I understand the problem. What I don't understand is why the perceived solution to that problem is to fill your web sites with tons of advertisements.
Upgrading Apache httpd on RHEL and CentOS
November 24, 2006 by Jason · 62 Comments
By popular request, I've decided to write a How-To on upgrading your RHEL or CentOS 4 system from httpd 2.0.52 to 2.2.3. I'm going to issue a warning upfront though, this is NOT a simple src.rpm rebuild like the PHP upgrade how-to that I wrote. Upgrading httpd requires filling a couple dependencies, building httpd, and then rebuilding everything that depends on httpd. For most people, that means just PHP. For some sites, that may include mod_perl, mod_python, etc.
If you're using some kind of management panel like Plesk, CPanel, etc. then DO NOT follow these instructions as you will break your server. In fact, if you have a separate development environment (like an OpenVZ VPS or a separate server) then I'd suggest using that because the build process actually requires you to remove your current copy of httpd. In any case, if you're still interested, keep reading.
To complete this upgrade you're going to need 3 things. First, you'll need 'root' access to your server. Without it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, you're going to need to install some dependencies to meet the build requirements. Finally, you're going to need to get the src.rpm files for httpd, apr, apr-util, and pcre from FC6.
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PubCon 2006 Night Life
November 22, 2006 by Jason · 9 Comments
So, if you read the LinkWorth blog, you'll already know that something interesting happened to the group of us that went to the Viva Las Vegas Lounge on Thursday night. I want to toss out my perspective on that night (as, possibly, the most sober person in the group). To give you a hint of what's coming, let me plug in a few key phrases like "Beer", "Dirty Vodka Martinis", "Limousine", and "Tattoo Parlor".
The day started off pretty much like Tuesday and Wednesday did. We got up early, took the monorail to the conference, learned about SEO and whatnot from the presenters, had a few drinks at the Ask.com reception, etc., etc., etc... This night, however, we had plans to go big. Before we even left Pennsylvania, my boss mentioned that he wanted to meet up with the guys from LinkWorth. I didn't really know who they were, other than that we had been working with them for years. Now, Thursday was supposed to be our "free night", where we could do whatever we wanted as long as we didn't get arrested and as long as we didn't miss the flight the next day. However, trusting that the people I was traveling with would make this an interesting night, I said "alright" and tagged along.
After dropping our laptops and swag (if anyone nabbed more green silly putty than I did, I'd be surprised) off at the hotel (we stayed at the MGM, by the way), we started our trek to find the Hard Rock Casino & Hotel. About 40 minutes later we arrived at the Casino and proceeded to the Lounge. Much to our surprise, Jim Breuer was there, just wrapping up a show with the Sirius Radio guys. After the requisite photo snaps, we all set out to find the guys from Linkworth. This is where we ran into a problem. See, we'd never met them before. We had ZERO clue as to what they looked like. Our only recourse, of course, was to simply walk up to EVERY table in the lounge asking "Are you from LinkWorth?" After making our way to the opposite end of the lounge, we finally ran into them at the very last table.
Upgrading to PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL and CentOS
November 21, 2006 by Jason · 42 Comments
I spend a good amount of time on vBulletin sites. In fact, the company I work for owns about a dozen sites with a combined total of about 10 Million posts. One of the most common questions I hear, aside from "Can you help me optimize my server?", is "How can I upgrade to a newer version of PHP?".
While Red Hat's policy of backporting patches to provide a 5-year maintenance cycle on their OS releases certainly has its uses, it really does leave users without the benefits of using newer software versions. Newer software not only provides new features but can improve performance.
Thankfully, you don't actually need to build from scratch to upgrade an RHEL4 or CentOS4 system because srpms are available from newer versions of Fedora. If you don't know, Fedora is the test bed for future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The remainder of this article is going to instruct you on how to rebuild the php-5.1.6 src.rpm from FC6.
There are three things you're going to need to upgrade your copy of PHP. First, you're going to need 'root' access to your server. If you don't have it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, on most machines, you'll need to install a huge list of dependencies. Finally, you'll need the PHP src.rpm from FC6.
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