Matt’s Blog > Linux Tips

From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file…
The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate a [...]

In case anyone else is struggling like I am… After you install MySQL on CentOS, it doesn’t seem to want to start… You run mysqld and it barfs up an error.
It turns out that it’s because you need to run service mysqld start instead.
(And if you’re looking for how to install GD2 for PHP, and [...]

I’m going to use the default Apache and PHP that come from the CentOS repositories (until I get irritated enough with how old they are…).
So I just did an install of php-pecl-memcache and let yum fetch the “dependencies,” which, in this case, included Apache and PHP. O:-)
In other news, I’m slightly confused about why memcache [...]

So I’ve mentioned before that I run an NTP server. Stratum 2, which means it gets its time from a “Stratum 1,” which is set directly to something reliable. The main goal of NTP is to keep clocks in sync, and it’s pretty accurate, down to a fraction of a second, which is more accuracy [...]

I just discovered PhotoRec, a tool for recovering digital camera images.
For the non-geeks, a quick basic background…. When you save a file, it writes it to various blocks on the disk. Then it makes an entry in the File Allocation Table, pointing to where on the disk the file is. When you delete a file, [...]

As much as I love open source software, I tend to shy away from the die-hard “OpenSource or bust” people. I use closed-source (”restricted”) drivers when need be, and they usually work better, since the vendors can optimize them.
I’m quite frustrated, though, with ATI… The closed-source fglrx drivers give good performance, but have some major [...]

I’ve been running an NTP server on this host for quite some time now. But as of yesterday, I’m a member of the pool.ntp.org group. pool.ntp.org is a round-robin-ish DNS service where requests for pool.ntp.org are given IPs from a huge block of listed nameservers, balancing the load across a pool of about 1,500 NTP [...]

I’ve redone ttwagner.com. It’s no longer a random integer between 0 and 255, but instead, a decent-looking site. I’ve integrated some of the cool things I’m hosting there as well. I came across a few interesting things I wanted to point out.
The world DNS page is incredibly intensive, and, since it’s not dynamic, there’s no [...]

Gnome (the desktop environment, not the creepy garden fixtures) has a “Trash Folder,” which is the functional equivalent of the Windows Recycle Bin. This is slightly problematic for those of us who are used to file “deletion” on Linux instantly unlinking the file, who don’t expect that the files are being moved somewhere. Especially as [...]

In the hopes of helping someone else…  Ubuntu has two options for a plugin for Firefox to play Flash. There’s the open-source Gnash and “the real thing” from Adobe. Of course what Adobe provides is closed-source, so there seems to be a tendency to push Gnash. But having used Gnash, it’s awful. I give them [...]