Tech From the Trenches

It wasn’t that long ago that I decided to partition a couple of our new servers using the LVM file system.  I have read that using the LVM (logical volume manager) is much for flexible than using standard ext3 or ext4 partitions.  This is true when you are using a physical server with physical hard [...]

Drupal is the tool of choice for our web site team, but it using alot of dynamic page content.  Consequently, that increases the memory usage for the apache server processes.  Each process on our production server uses 30-50MB.  The server currently has 4GB total memory, so that means it should be able to handle 80-130 [...]

If you would like to query for a particular record type for a domain, then this tip is for you.  In my specific case, I needed to make sure that my mail server was reading the txt record correctly for our domain.  You can use this host command to do so: #host -t txt <domainname> [...]

Plesk doesn’t provide an easy way to make virtualhost configuration changes in Apache.  When Plesk is installed the default Apache settings are left untouched.  Plesk adds a .conf file to Apache’s conf.d directory that specifies “Include” parameters for the each domain’s configuration file.  The Plesk config files are over written whenever changes are made via [...]

We have migrated and updated our Moodle databases several times over the years, which has resulted in inconsistent database collations.  I am by no means a database expert, but I know how to find the answers to the problems at hand.  Here are some of the steps that I used to upgrade our moodle site [...]

I had a heck of a time finding out how to see what the parameters were currently loaded for MySQL on our servers.  By default, when you install MySQL server from the Ubuntu repositories, the my.cnf config file specifies only a few variables.  And the rest just use a default value (my assumption).  We recently [...]