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Recommended mount options for ext3

The details of the various mount options for the ext3 filesystem are fairly well documented, but as with many things in the Unix world, knowledge is far easier to come by than wisdom. That’s a pithy way of saying that I had to do some digging to find recommendations, as opposed to explanations. So here […]

Save power and heat: spin down backup drives when idle

Here’s a tip for those of you who, like me, back up your data to hard disks instead of tapes. Backing up to the same hard disk doesn’t protect you much (if the disk failed, you’d lose the data and the backup at once), so presumably you’re backing up to a separate physical drive. That […]

Retroactively Minimizing Installed Packages on CentOS 5.1

In my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide I describe how to install a very lean set of OS packages when starting from scratch. But what if the VPS is preinstalled for you by a hosting provider? There will be things preinstalled that you don’t need, which will slow down backups and updates, and waste […]

Why mod_rails is great for light-duty Rails apps

The Ruby on Rails story is usually presented to the new developer as a wonderful break from tradition that makes a developer’s life so much better than the frameworks of the past. The clattering of skeletons in the closet you’re hearing? Well, that’s because it makes the sysadmin’s life much worse than PHP or Java. […]

Sphinx Search init script for Centos 5.1

Sphinx search is pretty new, and as a result I was unable to find a nice convenient package for it for CentOS 5.1. This is problematic since there is no init script included with the source tarball, and the issue of updating the index is the sysadmin and developer’s problem, and cannot be configured to […]