Administration on System Overlord

Memo to Self when Moving Databases

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:50:32 +0000

As a memo to myself, and in case others aren't aware of this:

If you move the entirety of a mysql server (e.g., all databases, especially the "mysql" database) to a new Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) server, you need to make sure the debian-sys-maint user is created or updated.

If moving from a non-Debian-ish environment, try:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '--password--' WITH GRANT OPTION;

where "--password--" comes from /etc/mysql/debian.cnf.

apc.stat=0 and Updating Software

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:36:41 +0000

When you're running APC on PHP and you have apc.stat=0, it's sometimes easy to forget that when you update software (WordPress) the code running on your server remains unchanged until you flush the APC cache. So, when you go to update WordPress to 3.0.5, you should flush your APC cache after running the update. If you don't, you'll be very confused when WordPress repeatedly tells you to upgrade to the version you just installed!

Welcome to Nginx!

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 17:49:21 +0000

If you're reading this, it's thanks to Nginx. As of about midnight last night, all content on SystemOverlord.com is being served up by Nginx. I did this for two reasons: Nginx has a much smaller memory profile than Apache, which is important when running on a 512MB VPS, and Nginx's preferred PHP path is through a FastCGI interface, which allows me to run separate PHP FastCGIs under different users for each application on my server. Privilege separation for different webapps has always been a big thing security-wise, and I'm glad I was able to get it going with a minimum of fuss. Wordpress, Nginx, MySQL, and Ubuntu Server powered, all on a Linode VPS!

IPv6: On my Linode, and at Home

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 02:07:32 +0000

Hurricane Electric, ARIN, and others, report that we may be as close as 12 days to exhaustion of the main IPv4 pool. Accordingly, I decided it was time to get both my VPS and my home network IPv6-ready. It wasn't as painful as I feared, though doing it in DD-WRT is a bigger pain than it should be. If I had an OpenWRT router, it looks like it would be easier.