Recently I made the decision to stop living in the past and start living in the present by using the latest stable release of PHP, version 5.5.8. Unfortunately on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I always run LTS releases on my servers) the latest version of PHP available is from the 5.3
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At least I think that’s what was happening. Today I made the somewhat calculated risk of upgrading my production server from PHP 5.3.10 to PHP 5.5.7. Scary stuff, jumping 2 point revisions like that but I was feeling cocky after jumping 3 point revisions to bring nginx up to the
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Been a while since I’ve covered setting up a brand new LAMP server. This time, I’m going to be using Ubuntu 13.10 and once you are logged into your server you will want to update and upgrade it to the latest software versions: sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Once
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Last week I discussed the importance of version control for individuals but something I didn’t touch on was how version control systems can be used to simplify and/or automate deployments. I’ve been through the different setups out there, using plain old rsync, leveraging GitHub’s Post-Receive WebHook to call a URL
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The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a PECL package that provides an opcode cache for PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf is the lead of the project along with a handful of other developers. What is an opcode cache? Before I can answer that, let’s discuss how PHP works. Because it is an
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Let’s be honest, sometimes we don’t necessarily want to start a site from scratch, especially a blog. There’s so many blogging platforms out there, why reinvent the wheel? Arguably the most well known, Wordpress, is very easy to install on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. First things first, you will need to
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SQLite is a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. The SQLite website also boasts that it is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. As I’ve previously discussed, SQLite has the advantage over MySQL as it can be used as an internal session handler with PHP.
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Installing the Memcached module for PHP on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is as simple as can be. First let’s make sure we have Memcached installed: sudo apt-get install memcached On Ubuntu, the process to install the PHP module is similar to how we installed Memcached itself: sudo apt-get install php5-memcache php5-memcached
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Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a good ol’ LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but in my experience, Apache doesn’t necessarily scale all that well with PHP. It’s really not Apache’s fault, the fact is that most of the time servers are configured to use the
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It seemed fitting that the first post on PHP Avenue should be about setting up a new server with PHP. This particular post will focus on a traditional LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I also intend on writing additional posts covering the setup of a
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This one’s pretty simple, but it’s not documented by Linode and most of the sites I found on Google were people ranting about a lack of documentation but failing to provide their solution. The situation is this, I’m running sites behind a Linode NodeBalancer and I want the user’s real
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The Desktop Services Store (DS_Store) as you probably already know, is a file that stores some metadata about the files in a directory in the OS X. I’ve taken a look at them, they seem pretty harmless, but in the realm of PCI Compliance they are a medium risk because
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As you may remember from a previous post, I typically rewrite my error traffic back to / instead of having a fancy 404 page. The logic behind this is that I’d rather get my users to a page that’s functional instead of presenting them with an error page, also I’ve
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I was talking to someone last week about how I attempt to keep cool when things fall apart. I call it “the Zen of the Server Crash” and as luck would have it, everything started to fall apart that afternoon. First to go was our Internet connection at CrowdSavings.com HQ.
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I have this nasty habit of being completely dismissive of HTTP error handling by not handling 404 errors and setting the ErrorDocument in my .htaccess file to point to / (e.g. ErrorDocument 404 /). For the most part, this has never been an issue shy of needing to explain why
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Recently I’ve been building out dedicated MySQL servers to combat some of the shortcomings we have encountered with hosting MySQL on Rackspace Cloud Sites (commentary on this will be saved for another post). During my research on what I could do to set up the server as securely as possible
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Well after a few days of not being able to run any upgrades on my installed copy of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, last night things started moving. The upgrade process from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 took all of last night (I started it around 9PM) and on through this
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