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• Laptops with easy heat sink service?

  - by Niten

  Can you recommend a current laptop model with easy heat sink access – or better yet, a removable air intake filter – making it easy to periodically clean out the dust and lint that always packs up in these things? Every laptop I've owned has eventually overheated on account of a clogged heat sink. (I suppose it doesn't help that I have a cat who loves to hang out where I'm working, or that my laptop is almost always running.) One of the things I really love about my current system, a Dell Inspiron 1420n, is how easy it is to service its cooling system: whenever I notice the fan starting to work harder and the CPU temperature climbing higher than it should be, I merely have to unscrew a single panel from the bottom of the machine, clean out the heat sink, and then I'm good for another few months. Which current models of the "business laptop" variety offer similar easy cooling system service? I'm looking for something roughly along the lines of: 14- or 15-inch display Nehalem-based CPU Solid construction – magnesium chassis or better (like the Inspiron) TPM (for BitLocker) ideal, but not mandatory Docking adapter ideal, but not mandatory Good battery life For example, the ThinkPad T410 would have been my top choice, but it seems like it would be a serious chore to service its heat sink. For the current MacBook Pros it looks downright impossible. No matter how nice the laptop is in other respects, it'll be of no use to me when it's overheating. So, any suggestions? Thanks in advance... (I'm constantly surprised that customers and manufacturers don't pay more attention to this feature, at least in the business laptop subcategory. In the last couple months I've fixed two friends' laptops which were also overheating due to clogged cooling systems; clearly I'm not the only one affected by this.)

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• Need guidance on a Google Map application that has to show 250 000 polylines.

  - by lucian.jp

  I am looking for advice for an application I am developing that uses Google Map. Summary: A user has a list of criteria for searching a street segment that fulfills the criteria. The street segments will be colored with 3 colors for showing those below average, average and over average. Then the user clicks on the street segment to see an information window showing the properties of that specific segment hiding those not selected until he/she closes the window and other polyline becomes visible again. This looks quite like the Monopoly City Streets game Hasbro made some month ago the difference being I do not use Flash, I can’t use Open Street Map because it doesn’t list street segment (if it does the IDs won’t be the same anyway) and I do not have to show Google sketch building over. Information: I have a database of street segments with IDs, polyline points and centroid. The database has 6,000,000 street segment records in it. To narrow the generated data a bit we focus on city. The largest city we must show has 250,000 street segments. This means 250,000 line segment polyline to show. Our longest polyline uses 9600 characters which is stored in two 8000 varchar columns in SQL Server 2008. We need to use the API v3 because it is faster than the API v2 and the application will be ported to iPhone. For now it's an ASP.NET 3.5 with SQl Server 2008 application. Performance is a priority. Problems: Most of the demo projects that do this are made with API v2. So besides tutorial on the Google API v3 reference page I have nothing to compare performance or technology use to achieve my goal. There is no available .NET wrapper for the API v3 yet. Generating a 250,000 line segment polyline creates a heavy file which takes time to transfer and parse. (I have found a demo of one polyline of 390,000 points. I think the encoder would be far less efficient with more polylines with less points since there will be less rounding.) Since streets segments are shown based on criteria, polylines must be dynamically created and cache can't be used. Some thoughts: KML/KMZ: Pros: Since it is a standard we can easily load Bing maps, Yahoo! maps, Google maps, Google Earth, with the same KML file. The data generation would be the same. Cons: LineString in KML cannot be encoded polyline like the Google map API can handle. So it would probably be bigger and slower to display. Zipping the file at the size it will take more processing time and require the client side to uncompress the data and I am not quite sure with 250,000 data how an iPhone would handle this and how a server would handle 40 users browsing at the same time. JavaScript file: Pros: JavaScript file can have encoded polyline and would significantly reduce the file to transfer. Cons: Have to create my own stripped version of API v3 to add overlays, create polyline, etc. It is more complex than just create a KML file and point to the source. GeoRSS: This option isn't adapted for my needs I think, but I could be wrong. MapServer: I saw some post suggesting using MapServer to generate overlays. Not quite sure for the connection with our database and the performance it would give. Plus it requires a plugin for generating KML. It seems to me that it wouldn't allow me to do better than creating my own KML or JavaScript file. Maintenance would be simpler without. Monopoly City Streets: The game is now over, but for those who know what I am talking about Monopoly City Streets was showing at max zoom level only the streets that the centroid was inside the Bounds of the window. Moving the map was sending request to the server for the new streets to show. While I think this was ingenious, I have no idea how to implement something similar. The only thing I thought about was to compare if the long was inside the bound of map area X and same with Y. While this could improve performance significantly at high zoom level, this would give nothing when showing a whole city. Clustering: While cluster is awesome for marker, it seems we cannot cluster polylines. I would have liked something like MarkerClusterer for polylines and be able to cluster by my 3 polyline colors. This will probably stay as a “would have been freaking awesome but forget it”. Arrow: I will have in a future version to show a direction for the polyline and will have to show an arrow at the centroid. Loading an image or marker will only double my data so creating a custom overlay will probably be my only option. I have found that demo for something similar I would like to achieve. Unfortunately, the demo is very slow, but I only wish to show 1 arrow per polyline and not multiple like the demo. This functionality will depend on the format of data since I don't think KML support custom overlays. Criteria: While the application is done with ASP.NET 3.5, the port to the iPhone won't use the web to show the application and be limited in screen size for selecting the criteria. This is why I was more orienting on a service or page generating the file based on criteria passed in parameters. The service would than generate the file I need to display the polylines on the map. I could also create an aspx page that does this. The aspx page is more documented than the service way. There should be a reason. Questions: Should I create a web service to returns the street segments file or create an aspx page that return the file? Should I create a JavaScript file with encoded polyline or a KML with longitude/latitude based on the fact that maximum longitude/latitude polyline have 9600 characters and I have to render maximum 250,000 line segment polyline. Or should I go with a MapServer that generate the overlay? Will I be able to display simple arrow on the polyline on the next version. In case of KML generation is it faster to create the file with XDocument, XmlDocument, XmlWriter and this manually or just serialize the street segment in the stream? This is more a brainstorming Stack Overflow question than an actual code problem. Any answer helping narrow the possibilities is as good as someone having all the knowledge to point me out a better choice.

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• Remote server security: handling compiler tools

  - by Gonzolas

  Hello! I was wondering wether to remove compiler tools (gcc, make, ...) from a remote production server, mainly for security purposes. Background: The server runs a web application on Linux. Consider Apache jailed. Otherwise, only OpenSSHd faces the public network. Of course there is no compiler stuff within the jail, so this is about the actual OS outside of any jails. Here's my personal PRO/CON list (regarding removal) so far: PRO: I had been reading some suggestions to remove compiler tools in order inhibit custom building of trojans etc. from within the host if an attacker attains unpriviliged user permissions. CON: I can't live without Perl/Python and a trojan/whatever could be written in a scripting language like that, anyway, so why bother about removing gcc et al. at all. There is a need to build new Linux kernels as well as some security tools from source directly on the server, because the server runs in 64-bits mode and (to my understanding) I can't (cross-)compile locally/elsewhere due to lack of another 64-bits hardware system. OK, so here are my questions for you: (a) Is my PRO/CON assessment correct? (b) Do you know of other PROs / CONs to removing all compiler tools? Do they weigh in more? (c) Which binaries should I consider dangerous if the given PRO statement holds? Only gcc, or also make, or what else? Should I remove the enitre software packages them come with? (d) Is it OK to just move those binaries to a root-only accessible directory when they are not needed? Or is there a gain in security if I "scp them in" every time? Thank you!

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• Recommendations for good FTP server for Win 2008 x64

  - by sfhtimssf1970

  I spent a bunch of time learning/configuring the "all new and better" FTP feature for IIS7. In my opinion, it still fails hard: In order to have multiple FTP sites on the same machine, you have to use host|user usernames (like domain.com|jason) for every account. Using IIS Manager auth doesn't seem to work at all. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what the hell it is. I've read all the official articles on it and configured it a hundred different ways. Doesn't play well with passive connection types. That has to be disabled on the client in order for it to work. Doesn't have any way to allow one user to see multiple sites no matter what binding they are connected to. For instance, if "jason" connects to ftp.domain.com, he should be able to see domain2.com, domain3.com without seeing domain4.com and domain5.com. It takes an act of God to set this up with IIS7. So I'm wanting to install a third party FTP server instead. I've looked at FileZilla both ZFTPServer. Anyone know of any pros/cons on these? Any other recommendations?

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• Should one have a separate user account for work use? [closed]

  - by Tyler Wayne

  This question examines the practice of using a separate OS-level user account to divide work use from personal use (specifically, in a creative profession and on a personal computer). I recently left my in-the-flesh job to go to school, but I'm carrying on with the work remotely. I do all of my work on my laptop, and I currently have a separate user account called "Work" where I do exactly that. However, I'm now starting to question that practice. Because my hobby is the same as my job, I want to save notes of the things I learn while working. Because ideas come at any moment, I often want to throw something into my personal task manager's inbox and look at it again later. That task manager is well-suited to handle both the work and personal aspects of my life. Only my personal account has admin rights, but work sometimes requires me to install programs. My employer has no preference regarding my choice, so that is a non-issue. My work is essentially freelance web development, so advice given with that in mind will be much appreciated. Back up all opinion with some personal experience, please. Ideally, give a list of pros and cons and then name reasons for your position.

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• How to send T.38 from a mac?

  - by Brian Postow

  I'm trying to set up a fax-server on a macintosh. I have Hylafax, and we're going to use an internet FOIP fax provider (Haven't decided who yet, that may be another question). The problem is how to get from Hylafax to T.38. I know of two options, but I'm not sure how to decide between them: T38modem Advantages: It's only one extra program, and i know that I can compile it for the Mac. (well, At least I can get the H323 version working on a Mac) Disadvantages: It is mostly undocumented and seems to be supported only by one guy in Russia. IAXModem/Asterisk Advantages: It's well known, and well supported. We can pay for support. It presumably does the T38 with SIP correctly, so we don't have to worry about it. Disadvantages: It's two separate programs. While I know how to get Asterisk on a mac, I'm not sure about IAXModem. (It's sourceforge, and linux, but compiling things for a mac isn't always straight forward...) It's also mostly undocumented. Do these seem like an accurate listing of the pros/cons? Anyone have any other suggestions? thanks.

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• Drobo FS vs Lime Technology unRAID vs FreeNAS

  - by elluca

  I already decided to by a drobo fs until I just found these two tests: http://www.digitalversus.com/data-robotics-drobo-fs-p889_9543_487.html http://www.digitalversus.com/lime-technology-unraid-p889_8992_473.html The two cons agains drobo for me: loudness price What disadvantages has the unraid stuff against the drobo fs? Has it also got that ease of use like swapping drives on the go, simply extend capacity by plugging in new drives, notify me of drive errors, disk failure protection, dynamic space of "partitions", better/worse effective capacity, etc. Which is more secure? Am I able to simply replace a bad drive with a new one on unraid? What happens if my pc fails? Lets say the cpu overheats. Since I have a complete pc which is going to be replaced, I only have to pay the software to use unraid. I am going to use my nas for: music library (how well does it integrate with iTunes? ) picture library movie library development (i need to be able to be to use time machine) I am going to use this nas with a MacBook pro. My current disks: 2x 500Gb 1x 1.5Tb 1x 2Tb On a drobo fs I would have 2.26 Tb of space. What would it be on unraid? Is FreeNAS also an alternative?

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• What are best practices on virtual lab/test bed architecture?

  - by WooYek

  I am currently preparing a new small virtual environment for development and testing with Windows Server + SQL Server + AD + Sharepoint + Exchange + IIS(ASP.NET) + Biztalk + ?, for a small (up to 5) dev team. What are pros and cons on different approaches, eg. splitting up over different machines or packing everything up per machine. I your experience what are the best practices I should follow in terms of architecture and various system/servers placement. What to share and what to split per person. I would like to achieve some flexibility for the dev and testing process (so teammebers would not be steeping on each other's toes) and limit administrative effort needed to propagate settings, integrate work items and revert changes when something breaks up. It's not supposed to be an everyday development working environment, more a tier 2 developer testing environment, and not yet an integration or QA testing environment with formal change process. IMO the two borderline solutions are: creating one all-inclusive machine for each dev team member giving them freedom to manage creating shared environment managed by the one with somehow formalized change request process What golden mean would you recommend, and why?

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• VMWare Host Not Responding - VMs are Disconnected (ESXi 3.5)

  - by EyeonTech

  I have inherited a VMWare environement ESX v3i 3.5. I am not fluent with VMWare ESXi so bare with me. Two days ago, when I opened Virtual Centre, one of the Hosts showed up as Not Responding. The error I am seeing is:----- Unable to acquire licenses because license source is unavailable: The license manager has not been started yet, the wrong port@host or license file is being used, or the port or hostname in the license file has been changed. What I have tried: I have Stopped and Started the license server within the application. When I do this, I am able to disconnect the host in Virtual Centre and reconnect. This brings the host back online, but a few minutes later, the host goes to a not responding state again. I have rebooted the server with the Licensing software installed. While browsing Google, I have not been able to find any steps I feel comfortable performing and I would like the opinion of the VMWare pros. Where are the log files I should be looking at to correctly determine what is going on? Has anyone seen this behaviour and how did you resolve it? Thank you

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• Setup staging with multiple SVN

  - by Kapil Sharma

  We are a startup, setting new environments for product to be released soon. Planned server structure with planned release flow is as shown in below image It ideally have a local server (or Staging server, shown in green) in local office, without public IP address and Production Server (Red) at Amazon EC2. Both local and production server have there own SVN copy. Management here want to update production server with production SVN and without providing its access to developers (including freelancers/contract employees). So for developers, there is a Local SVN on local server. Another purpose of local SVN to keep a copy of code on local server, which is under our direct control. Although there are some technical concerns like how will code at local server will be updated from local SVN and commit on production SVN but bigger question is, is that structure correct? Major requirement remain don't provide production SVN access to developers. What are other possible options to achieve that? Another minor question, if suitable here, if above structure is correct, is it possible for a SVN checkout to get updated from one SVN (Local SVN) but commit to other (Production SVN)? If yes, How? edit An answer has been accepted but for bounty, I'm still looking for answer Is that structure correct? Its pros/Cons? Technical solution is already provided by accepted answer.

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• Hosting websites in our Workplace custom-built datacentre

  - by i.h4d35

  I'm faced with unique learning opportunity at work at the moment. Due to the slowdown (amongst other reasons), the powers that be at my office have decided to abandon our shared hosting providers (both shared and dedicated hosting) and have decided to host the websites at our office's datacentre. We're running 7 websites, wherein the average unique hits per day at the moment is about 900. We have 2 servers set aside for this - one is a DELL POWER EDGE 1850 (Intel Xeon 3 GHZ*2, 4GB RAM, 73GB HDD and the other is an HP DL 380 G3 (Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz, 6 GB RAM, 73 GB HDD) a) I would like to know the pros and cons of going ahead with this project.All the sites will be hosted on a single IP. In all probability, the OS is going to be CentOS. b) Do you think I should consider Virtualization into this equation (KVM/Xen)? I was thinking in terms of separate instances of the DB server and the frontend though I do not know if this is the best way to go. c) Should I be trying to use cloud stacks like OpenStack and try to make it look like websites hosted on some sort of Public Cloud? (something that I checked out here). Here is something else I came across, which looks similar to what needs to be done at our office. About the websites - Of the 7 websites, 4 are basic static websites which basically gives a whole lot of information about a few local institutions. The remaining 3 are local product-based websites developed in PHP wherein end user can view products and order them online. I am trying to take this as a learning experience wherein I can learn to build something from scratch and save the company a little something in the process. The migration needs to be completed by Easter so I guess it gives us some time (or am I being overly optimistic??). I am confused here and would appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks in advance.

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• Managing an application across multiple servers, or PXE vs cfEngine/Chef/Puppet

  - by matt

  We have an application that is running on a few (5 or so and will grow) boxes. The hardware is identical in all the machines, and ideally the software would be as well. I have been managing them by hand up until now, and don't want to anymore (static ip addresses, disabling all necessary services, installing required packages...) . Can anyone balance the pros and cons of the following options, or suggest something more intelligent? 1: Individually install centos on all the boxes and manage the configs with chef/cfengine/puppet. This would be good, as I have wanted an excuse to learn to use one of applications, but I don't know if this is actually the best solution. 2: Make one box perfect and image it. Serve the image over PXE and whenever I want to make modifications, I can just reboot the boxes from a new image. How do cluster guys normally handle things like having mac addresses in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg* files? We use infiniband as well, and it also refuses to start if the hwaddr is wrong. Can these be correctly generated at boot? I'm leaning towards the PXE solution, but I think monitoring with munin or nagios will be a little more complicated with this. Anyone have experience with this type of problem? All the servers have SSDs in them and are fast and powerful. Thanks, matt.

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• Redis as substitution for Memcache

  - by Boban P.

  We have distributed web app, and for now, as session handler, we use two separate instances of memcache in redundancy, so everything that is written in one memcache is also written in other. Memcache is fairly easy to install, use, and maintain but we have one problem: if one memcache fail, everything is fine, php comunicate with other instance which has all data (although, half of connections have a delay because they try to use failed one, wait a little, and then contact other memcache). When failed instance comes back to life again, it starts up empty. If established session request data from that instance, session fails, and user logs out, and that happens to half of users.So, we are thinking about to switch to redis for session handling, and maybe keep memcache for cache only. My questions are: If we setup redis instances as master-slave, and if master fails, can sentinel promote slave as new master and when old master comes back to life, will it stay as slave or not? Is redis call malloc at startup to allocate part of memory, like memcache or varnish, or it calls malloc for every key inserted? And what are pros and cons of that?

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• Is the APC BR700G UPS (or similar) compatible with Active PFC power supplies?

  - by David Zaslavsky

  I'm looking at getting a UPS for my home computer. So far the APC BR700G looks very promising, except for one thing: one of the reviews on Newegg says that this UPS does not work with a power supply with Active PFC. Pros: Unit looks great, built well, very heavy, was excited to use it. Cons: Didn't research enough - many newer power supplies like my corsair 750w (and yes dells and other mainstreamers sell them too) that I bought last year have a feature called active pfc (power factor corrected). The signal for this backup battery doesn't fully support that feature and can cause issues. You can find an article on APCs site if you search their user forums for PFC. And the power supply in my computer is, in fact, an Active PFC PSU. I've already found one answer on this site claiming that it's not an issue, that "most quality supplies these days have PFC and work just fine with a UPS." That disagrees with the review on Newegg. Can someone explain this discrepancy? Also, what is it exactly about a UPS that makes it incompatible with an Active PFC PSU? (if anything) Is there some way to tell based on the technical specifications, or do I just have to hunt for reviews online to avoid wasting my money? While any input would be appreciated, I would prefer to get an answer from someone with actual experience with similar UPS's and Active PFC power supplies, who can tell me whether it works or not.

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• VMWare Setup with 2 Servers and a DAS (DELL MD3220)

  - by Kumala

  I am planning to use a VMWare based setup consisting of two VMWare servers (2 CPU, 256GB Memory) and a DAS (DELL MD3220 with 24x900GB disks). The virtual machines will be half running MS SQL databases (Application, Sharepoint, BI) and the other half of the VM will be file services, IIS. To enhance the capacity of the storage, we'll be adding a MD1220 enclosure with another 24x900GB to the MD3220. Both DAS will have 2 controllers. Our current measured IOPS is 1000 IOPS average, 7000 IOPS peak (those happen maybe twice per hour). We are in the planning phase now and are looking at the proper setup of the disks. The intention is to setup up both DAS one of the DAS with RAID 10 only and the other DAS with RAID 5. That will allow us to put the applications on the DAS that supports the application performance needs best. Question is how best to partition the two DASs to get best possible IOPS/MBps, each DAS will have to have 2 hot spares? For the RAID 5 Setup: Generally speaking, would it be better to have one single disk group across all 22 disks (24 - 2 hot spares) with both controllers assigned to the one disk group or is it better to have 2 disk groups each 11 disks, assigned to one of the two controllers? Same question for the RAID 10 setup: The plan is: 2 disks for logs (Raid 1), 2 Hotspare and 20 disks for RAID 10. Option 1: 5 * 4 disks (RAID 10), with two groups assigned to 1 controller and 3 groups to the other controller Option 2: One large RAID 10 across all the disks and have both controllers assigned to the same group? I would assume that there is no right or wrong, but it all depends very much on the specific application behaviour, so I am looking for some general ideas what the pros and cons are of the different options. IF there are other meaningful options, feel free to propose them.

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• Why is it bad to map network drives in Windows?

  - by Beeblebrox

  There has been some spirited discussion within our IT department about mapping network drives. In particular, it has been said that mapping network drives is A Bad Thing and that adding DFS paths or network shares to your (Windows Explorer/Libraries) Favourites is a far better solution. Why is this the case? Personally I find the convenience of z:\folder to be better than \\server\path\folder', particularly with cmd line and scripting (of course I'm not talking about hard-coded links, naturally!). I have tried searching for pros and cons of mapped network drives, but I haven't seen anything other than 'should the network go down, the drive will be unavailable'. But this is a limitation of any network-accessed storage... I have also been told that mapped network drives poll the network when the network resource is unavailable, however I haven't found more information on this. Wouldn't this still be an issue with other network access mechanisms (that is, mapped Favourites) whenever Windows tries to enumerate the file system (for example, when a file/folder picker dialog is opened)? -- Do network drives poll the network any more than a Windows Explorer library/favourite?

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• MacBook Air i5 4 GB RAM shows screen tearing when scrolling in browsers

  - by Sandro Dzneladze

  I see screen tearing pretty often while scrolling webpages up and down, and it has been like this from day 1. But now I purchased an external monitor which is huge (23 inches compared to the Mac's 11), and the effect is more visible. It is driving me nuts and giving me headaches. I wonder if you see the same. I was reading a lot about this problem, and it seems to be present on MacBook Pros as well? Can someone confirm I'm not alone? In other words: I'm deciding weather to go through warranty repair, or if it makes no sense if all of theme exhibit same behavior. It is shame to see this beautiful machine with an insane price tag to be lagging when browsing web, when the processor is just sitting there idle at 4-12%! This is an example I found on Wikipedia that more or less describes what happens when I scroll up down. The effect is not so pronounced and clears when I stop scrolling, but it is sure annoying the hell out of me. Firefox is tearing like hell, Chrome less, Safari exhibits jagged scrolling but less tearing compared to Chrome and Firefox. With synthetic benchmarks I don't see any problems with hardware. But this is not particularly revealing.

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• Is Cherokee (probably) the best static content server for beginner sysadmins?

  - by Bad Learner

  I have read the pros and cons of most of the popular web servers and have come to a conclusion that Apache would (probably) be the best web server for serving dynamic content - - no wonder YouTube, Flickr and Facbook, among many others, use it. I do not know if that C10K problem applies to Apache even when serving dynamic content only, but I think any web server used to serve dynamic content needs some good tweaking for optimized performance, and the fact that nothing beats Apache when it comes to documentation, resources and support on the web, I think should will go with Apache for dynamic content. That apart, the confusion begins when it comes to choosing web servers for static content (including streaming videos). I see that Nginx, Cherokee and Lighttpd are among the best (I am not considering non-open source or non-linux stuff here). So, which too choose? I know one cannot go wrong with any of the three (Nginx, Cherokee, Lighttpd). Lighttpd's development has evidently gotten slower than it was a good time ago. The documentation is pretty good for all the three, and hopefully, so are the resources (knowledge of these among the users of Stackoverflow/Serverfault sites, the web etc). Precisely, and noting point [2] and [3], if I am not wrong, I should either go with Nginx or Cherokee. I would love to see someone clarify these... is Cherokee just as fast (mb/s), performant (connections/s), and reliable (think downtime/restarting server) as Nginx for serving static content and load balancing, for small, medium to large (and really large) websites and applications? (Think, the size of YouTube, Apache or Facebook.) if the answer for the Q above is a big "hell, yes!" then, I should probably prefer Cherokee, right? Because, since I am a beginner, it would a lot easier to setup Cherokee as it has a graphical admin user interface + really good documentation. Yes? I could be wrong, I could be right. I put down what I know so that you can offer most relevant advise. Pardon if anything I've said is offensive.

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• Small store infrastructure - where to begin?

  - by KevinM1

  It looks like my older brother is about to change jobs - from lawyer to shooting range proprietor - and since I'm the family 'computer guy' I have the task of coming up with and setting up the in-store equipment. Only problem, I don't know how to start or where to look. I'm a web programmer, not an IT specialist. To that end, I figured I should ask the pros. Users: 3 (myself, my brother, and his business partner) Equipment: 1 Windows (likely 7) desktop for POS software, 1 Windows desktop/laptop for backroom use (bookkeeping, etc.) Other: ?? I'm looking for a reliable and, well, idiot-proof way to handle backups. Neither my brother nor his business partner are tech savvy (A web browser, email, MS Word and Excel are about the extent of their knowledge), so I need something they can handle. On-site would be preferable to off-site, given my brother's hesitance to have sensitive business data be handled by an outside source. I'm also looking for a small on-site server. I estimate that, at most, only 2-3 users will need access. A linux solution would keep costs down, but I'm concerned about Windows <- linux interoperability. Would the store security cameras' storage be handled by the security company, or would we have to stream that data to our own server? I know from my own experience with personal security that the company gives/loans a recording device to the home owner, but I'm not sure about business security. I know this sounds like a shopping list, and it's pretty vague. I wish I could give more detail, but between my own ignorance and things not being 100% nailed down on the business end, I'm a bit stuck. At the very least I'd like a nudge - links on a place to start, what to look for, things I need to think about, etc. - for this endeavor. Thanks.

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• Should I keep my ex-employer's data?

  - by Jurily

  Following my brief reign as System Monkey, I am now faced with a dilemma: I did successfully create a backup and a test VM, both on my laptop, as no computer at work had enough free disk space. I didn't delete the backup yet, as it's still the only one of its kind in the company's history. The original is running on a hard drive in continuous use since 2006. There is now only one person left at the company, who knows what a backup is, and they're unlikely to hire someone else, for reasons very closely related to my departure. Last time I tried to talk to them about the importance of backups, they thought I was threatening them. Should I keep it? Pros: I get to save people from their own stupidity (the unofficial sysadmin motto, as far as I know) I get to say "I told you so" when they come begging for help, and feel good about it I get to say nice things about myself on my next job interview Nice clean conscience Bonus rep with the appropriate deities Cons: Legal problems: even if I do help them out with it, they might just sue me for keeping it anyway, although given the circumstances I think I have a good case Legal problems: given the nature of the job and their security, if something leaks, I'm a likely target for retaliation Legal problems: whatever else I didn't think about I need more space for porn. Legal problems. What would you do?

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• What to look for in a switch with LAN/WAN verses an iSCSI SAN?

  - by Luke

  I'm setting up a VMWare ESXi 5 environment with 3 server nodes. Dell recommended 2x Force10 S60 switches shared (iSCSI SAN, LAN/WAN). The S60 switches are extremely powerful. They have 1.25 GB of buffer cache, < 9us latency. But they are very expensive (online price ~$15k per switch, actual quote a little less). I've been told that "by the book" you should at least have 2 internal switches for SAN, and 2 switches for LAN/WAN (each with a redundant). I know some of the pros and cons of each approach. What I'm wondering is, would it be more cost effective to disjoin the SAN from LAN with less expensive switches? The answer to this question highlights what I should be looking for in a switch for the SAN. What should I be looking for in a LAN/WAN switch, in comparison to the SAN? With the above linked question for the SAN: How is buffer latency measured? When you see 36 MB of buffer cache, is that shared or per port? So 36 MB would be 768kb or 36MB per port? With 3 to 6 servers how much buffer cache do you really need? What else should I be looking at? Our application will be heavily using HTML5 websockets (high number of persistent connections). The amount of data being sent is small; Data sent between client <- server isn't broadcasted (not a chat/IM service). We will be doing some database reporting too (csv export, sums, some joins). We are a small business and on a budget. We'd probably only be able to spend no more than $20k on switches total (2 or 4).

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• Apache 2.4 with PHP-FPM

  - by tubaguy50035

  I'm trying to setup Apache 2.4 with PHP-FPM 5.4 using the new modules with Apache 2.4. The following is what I have currently in my virtual host file: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin root@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www #Directory permissions <Directory /var/www/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride None Require all granted </Directory> CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost> I have PHP-FPM running using Unix sockets with a sock file located at /var/run/php5-fpm.sock. How do I proxy my requests to this sock file? I've seen some sites say to use ProxyPassMatch and others are saying Rewrite Rule. Are there pros or cons on either side? Also, most sites I'm seeing are showing ProxyPassMatch with a regex to only pass .php files. Could I also send it .html files? For whatever reason, we have a ton of PHP inside .html files. Edit: As noted in the comments, it looks like mod_proxy_fcgi doesn't support Unix sockets. Is there another module I should be using?

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• Does my Oracle DBA need root access?

  - by Dr I

  I'm currently discussing with my Oracle DBA Collegue that request a root access on our production servers. I'm not so hot to let him use the root access on our production servers. He is arguing that he need it to perform some operations like restarting the server and some other obscure arguments. The point is that I'm not agree with him because I've set him a Oracle user/group and a dba group where Oracle user belong. Everything is running smoothy and without any root permissions for now. I also think that all administrative tasks like scheduled server restart and so one need to be operated by the proper administrator (The Systems administrator on our case) to avoid any kind of issues related to a misunderstanding of the infrastructure interactions. So, I need the help of both, sysadmins and Oracle DBAs to lead me on the correct direction. If my collegue really need this rights I'll give him, but I'm just basically quite affraid of that because of security and integrity concerns. I know that my collegue is really good as a Oracle DBA and he know is work very well, but I also know that I've very few cases where a software and its admin really need root access. Once again, I'm not looking for pros/cons but rather an advice on the way that I should take to deal with this situation.

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• When should NTPd broadcast/broadcastclient be used instead of client/server or peer modes?

  - by Luke404

  The NTP deamon if often used in its simplest mode, which is client/server: you specify one or more server directives in your ntp.conf and your clients will use those servers. In addition to that, when you run your own NTP servers, it is good practice to peer them together, so if one of them looses connectivity to its upstream servers, it will get time from its peers. But NTPd can also work with broadcast and/or multicast distribution of time data, with the documentation stating: broadcast and multicast modes are intended for configurations involving one or a few servers and a possibly very large client population The documentation also says elsewhere: It is possible and frequently useful to configure a host as both broadcast client and broadcast server. A number of hosts configured this way and sharing a common broadcast address will automatically organize themselves in an optimum configuration based on stratum and synchronization distance. I can see one obvious administrative benefit: you don't have to manually specify and update your list of NTP servers in the clients ntp.conf, so to me it looks tempting to use broadcast mode even for a small client population (say 5+ clients with 3~4 servers). I expect network traffic to be a little higher with broadcasts instead of client/server associations, but given the usual gigabit ethernet LAN the impact should be negligible unless you have a very very large number of hosts in the same broadcast domain. At the end of the day, when should broadcast mode be used or avoided? Are there pros and cons I haven't seen?

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• Could hybrid SSD + HDD be made with fixed internal partitions?

  - by Aaron

  I was pretty close to getting Seagate's Momentus XT but have been scared off by the many problems reported on forums and feedback sites, especially in Mac Book Pros. So I'm waiting for mk 2 with some extra flash and better reliablilty I'm assuming will come out this year. What would suit me better though is a 32+500 hybrid drive where I have more control over what is on the flash drive and what is on the disk drive. So there are 2 physical partitions within the one 2.5" hard drive enclosure which use different media internally (32GB for core files and 500GB for data and multimedia). The partitions would be locked so they can't be changed. - Or even better, the disk driver just makes them appear as two disks to the OS that share the same bus... Perhaps it's ok if the bios just sees the first drive until the OS is loaded. Is either of it technically possible? Obviously difficult to market outside of the enthusiast market. The SSD memory modules can be pretty small right, so they could even make them a card that plugs into a secondary connection on the enclosure. That would be good for computer builders as well as for upgrading and recoverability. Then future operating systems could recognise these system SSD drives and automatically install the OS + swap files on it. While placing document libraries on the larger data drive. While in the longer term HDD will probably disapear there will always be a trade off between speed, storage size and expense.

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