For the past couple of months I've been slowly enhancing the capabilities of our website monitoring page. It's displayed on a big 42" LCD display in the middle of our office where everyone can see the latest up-to-the-minute updates in our page impressions, average page response times, number of RSS subscribers, etc. The page refreshes … Continue reading Extreme Feedback Device – Business on the Big Screen
Author: Dan Ackerson
Why rsync is a lousy deployment tool
A couple weeks back I told you how I was preparing subversion to handle our application deployment. Well, I can happily tell you that I finally finished this earlier in the week, but things didn't go exactly as planned. You see, I finally realized rsync is the real workhorse for handling deployments in our environment … Continue reading Why rsync is a lousy deployment tool
Data Mining Apache Logfiles
This is a guest post by Thomas Eisenbarth. Thomas studied computer science at the University of Augsburg, currently works at BINconsult GmbH, Berlin and co-founded makandra GmbH in Augsburg. He and his teams develop and operate web applications. Everybody knows those tools for analyzing logfiles written out by your favorite httpd: awstats, WebAlizer (yes, this … Continue reading Data Mining Apache Logfiles
Designing Code Structure for Server Deployment
I'm not sure when our offshore team decided to start using subversion. Was it at the start of (or during) their current project with us or have they always used it? One thing's for sure, they certainly never considered using it as a deployment tool and that's causing me one helluva headache today. The 'data/' … Continue reading Designing Code Structure for Server Deployment
Test driven Apache configuration?
I know I might be going out on a limb here, but I recently got burnt pretty badly by _not_ having any test harness around my Apache configuration. We maintain a database of some 15K rewrites and I accidentally blew this away. But it gets worse - we didn't even notice for a whole week! … Continue reading Test driven Apache configuration?
Four short links: 22 Mar 2009
Agile and ITIL, agile sys admins, why to work in small batches and how to handle bugs in an agile context - the topics for todays four short links. Agile and ITIL: A Powerful Combination (Joe Pearson, PM Hut) - I’ve also given a lot of thought on how to join the lean values of … Continue reading Four short links: 22 Mar 2009
Partitions and Warfare
This is a guest post by Julian Simpson. Julian blogs about builds, continuous integration and deployment at The Build Doctor by night. By day, he works in London as a build manager and systems administrator. Previously, Julian did a four year tour of duty at ThoughtWorks who plucked him from a systems administration role. He … Continue reading Partitions and Warfare
System Configurations + Code Revisions = Continuous Integration FTW!
This is a guest post by Patrick Debois, the author of JEDI: Just Enough Developed Infrastructure. I stumbled across Patrick early last year while searching desperately for some relevant topics on "agile operations". One amusing, yet poignant, hit was the lost use cases of Operations. Agile Web Operations didn't even exist at the time, but … Continue reading System Configurations + Code Revisions = Continuous Integration FTW!
Give Your Servers Some TLC: 10 Seconds A Day With Munin
For some damn reason, your website is slow again. It's a drag having to pour through logs looking for problems, but if you don't have any monitoring tools installed you don't have much choice. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there - easy to install, free to use and often make the difference between … Continue reading Give Your Servers Some TLC: 10 Seconds A Day With Munin
What I’ve Learned So Far
I've been working at NetDoktor for three months now. Half way through my trial period, I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect where the last few months have brought me and where I still want to go. Source Code Control I started my work last December of course by spending a lot … Continue reading What I’ve Learned So Far
