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Un-%&$-ing MySQL character sets and collations across an entire server
Recently, requests to one of our data-backed web services started timing out. It turned out the problem was that some of our data tables had been (re)created using the wrong character sets and collations. And as everyone should know, and now I do: Indexes are useless for joins unless the collations match The carefully optimized queries…
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Ubuntu 14.04… apt-get install “disk full” error (aaack!)
Recently we have been considering moving some MySQL database services from our cloud servers to Amazon RDS to simplify our management tasks, and wanted to run atop on some Ubuntu 14.04 LTS machines to get an initial sizing for RDS instances. While trying to apt-get install the atop package, I was getting a “disk full” error,…
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basic_vsftpd cookbook for Chef
Recently I was rebuilding an old “virtual user” vsFTPd server, this time using Chef. Of course I started by looking for a decent vsftpd cookbook. There are several popular ones, for example: The vsftpd “supermarket” cookbook might be fine for some users, but it’s not been updated since 2010, and it seems to lack a good way to override…
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Authenticating vsFTPd virtual users with pam_pwdfile.so
For years, the standard way to set up password authentication for vsFTPd FTP server was to use PAM with the pam_userdb.so module. It looks great on paper, but if you have tried this, you know that generating a Berkeley DB password file is a PITA, debugging is blind and brutal, and password file generation does not play well with automated deployments.…
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BackupBuddy and Amazon S3
BackupBuddy, the popular WordPress plugin to back up your WP site, has an option to back up to Amazon S3 storage. S3 storage is a great solution because it’s cheap, easy to use, and can be secure if you set it up right. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any decent instructions on how to set up S3 for…