So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

but “ps auxwww | grep 2451″ doesn’t show Varnish (in my case, it was dkim-milter on that pid) and “ps auxwww | grep varnish” shows nothing, then you need to manually reset Varnish’s SHMFILE settings.

This is easier done than said! Just go into /var/lib/varnish/[hostname] and delete all the files in there (such as varnish.8QhQPI and _.vsl). Restarting varnish should then be successful.

% cat “food in cans”
cat: can’t open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% “How would you rate Quayle’s incompetence?
Unmatched “.

% Unmatched “.
Unmatched “.

% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].

% ^How did the sex change operation go?^
Modifier failed.

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many (‘s.

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% sleep with me
bad character

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

% %blow
%blow: No such job.

% \(-
(-: Command not found.

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink matter
matter: cannot create

$ ddate
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 69th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3176

and of course:

unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep

Some of these work, some of these don’t – it all depends on your OS version. ddate does work on Centos.

varnishlog
See what Varnish is currently processing.

varnishtop -i RxHeader -I \^Referer
Show the referer (sic) header for requests.

varnishtop -b -i TxURL
Shows requests made to the backend (-b) where the line matches (-i) the transmit URL (TxURL). Basically, shows you what is being passed to the backend and isn’t being cached. It will list all requests going to a backend, grouped by URL and sorted by a decaying average of frequency. Basically the number on the left should be single-digit and preferably all 1s or less (a higher number means the backend request is taking place frequently). [Technically, you don't even need the "-b" as the TxURL is only set when making requests to the backend anyway]

varnishhist
Shows a histogram chart of the last 1,000 requests (by default) to the Varnish proxy showing “|” as a “hit” on the cache and “#” as a miss. The more “|” to the left of the chart, the better. The scale on the bottom is in seconds with 1e0 being “1″ second and 1e-6 being 0.000001seconds (1e-1 being 0.1seconds). The vertical scale is shown in the top left hand corner.

varnishstat
Shows various information about varnish – I’m sure I’ll figure out what they mean in time…

Use varnishreload
From http://kristian.blog.linpro.no/2009/02/18/easy-reloading-of-varnish-vcl/ , this is a very handy script you can use to reload varnish’s configuration without having to restart the proxy server:
#!/bin/bash
# Reload a varnish config
# Author: Kristian Lyngstol
FILE="/etc/varnish/default.vcl"
# Hostname and management port
# (defined in /etc/default/varnish or on startup)
HOSTPORT="localhost:6082"
NOW=`date +%s`
error()
{
echo 1>&2 "Failed to reload $FILE."
exit 1
}
varnishadm -T $HOSTPORT vcl.load reload$NOW $FILE || error
varnishadm -T $HOSTPORT vcl.use reload$NOW || error
echo Current configs:
varnishadm -T $HOSTPORT vcl.list

Show what caused recent 503 errors
varnishlog -d -c -o TxStatus 503

Clear stale cache by host name
purge req.http.host ~ example.com

See what status codes are being commonly hit by your users (ideally lots of 200 and few 5xxx)
varnishtop -i TxStatus
See also: http://www.slideshare.net/schoefmax/caching-with-varnish-1642989,
http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/10/12/pressflow-varnish-and-caching/ and http://letsgetdugg.com/2009/12/04/random-varnish-tips-n-tricks/

find -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec /usr/bin/perl -pi -e "s/ORIGINAL/NEW/g" {} \;

1. Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer?
   When I worked for a web hosting company, we did waste a lot of time doing web site designs for people as “mock ups” and a few times we did see the ideas “recycled” in their finished design even though they hadn’t paid us. The percentage of “mock ups to completed projects” was quite low as well – meaning wasted time. Oh – and the number of people that said “I don’t like that mock up, can you do another”… Grrr… On the plus side, I’ve just realised that an insurance company that I wrote the billing system for nearly a year ago whilst at my previous employer is still in use, despite the pet insurance company having very little (if anything) to do with my previous employer now. Go me!
2. Can you give us a discount rate?
   Am I the only person in the world that thinks “The price you see is the price you pay”? You don’t expect Tescos or Sainsburys to “haggle” the price of your food do you? Well, don’t expect web designers, programmers, hosting companies etc to do the same!
3. Will you register and host my site?
   I slightly disagree with this one – the designer will be able to register the domain name and host it with a third party: but as long as they make it totally clear they are just performing the “payment side” of things and the client needs to contact the appropriate company if there is any “non-design/code” issues then it should be ok.
4. Can you copy this site?
   Straight coping is a “no-no”, but trying to get a “similar look” to a site isn’t too bad. I.e. if you are doing a shopping cart: do you like the look of Amazon, Tesco, Play will help speed the design work along.
5. Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales?
   A big no from me here as well! If the designer/freelancer says to the customer “I’ll do it cheaper if you’ll split the sales” that means the designer/freelancer thinks the customer has a very good ideas. However, if the customers asks for it – then the customer must think it’s not such a good idea and hence doesn’t really want to risk their money.
6. I have a great idea. Do you want to…?
   To me, this’ll depend on the circumstances. If they came to me (as a programmer) and said they’d like to partner for me and they can supply the design and backend content, and I’ve got to figure out how to get the content online and handle the promotion of it – then I may do. However, if it’s a case of “I want a shop to sell books via Amazon. I can design the site, can you do the back end…” then IMHO they won’t be contributing that much to the project. If they added their own book reviews then that’s another kettle of fish.
7. Do you have an IM account?
   I’ve practically given up on IM clients (such as Yahoo, AOL, MSN Messenger and ICQ) mainly because of the Spam (Yahoo especially) and the fact that when I am logged in I’m not always available to chat (away from the machine) or I’m busy working on something. I tend to have my PC on a “always ready” state (i.e. text edit, browsers etc already loaded and positioned) so opening and closing Trillian (which I used to use to log me into all the different networks) will be an extra thing to remember…
8. Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done?
9. Is there any way you could get this done tonight or this weekend?
10. Can I be sure you won’t use this work in anything else?
    I tend to do the same as Samuel (the other of the original post) in that “(1) their code has utilized code from other projects which I haven’t charged them for, and (2) I will probably use code from their project on other projects, and (3) they own the code and implementation of the project (finished website), but not the actual code pieces (login system, image uploader, etc.). I pride myself in productivity and speed, and I need to use other code all the time to accomplish this.”. However, in most circumstances I do “copy my own code” but in a slightly different manner – so the “jist” of the code may be the same, it’ll be slightly different for each implmentation.

To find all the sym links, just run this simple Linux command line option:
find / -type l -exec ls -l {} \;

(and, if you would prefer all the symlinks to be stored in a file – as there will be a very large number of them – use the command find / -type l -exec ls -l {} \; > /home/admin/symlinks.txt).

I hope this helps somebody else who has to work with undocumented strangely configured Linux machines.

• Login to server “A” via SSH as root
• See if an RSA encryption key already exists by typing the following command:
  cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
  If the key does NOT exist (i.e. you do not receive any output or the system reports “No such file or directory”), then you’ll need to generate an RSA encryption key using the command:
  ssh-keygen -t rsa -N ''
  (note: those are two single quotes and NOT a double quote)
  You’ll then be prompted where to save the key (it should auto-suggest something like /root/.ssh/id_rsa which you should accept)
• Now you’ll need to copy the RSA encryption key to the remote server (server B). Still via SSH on server A”, enter the following commands (replacing serverb.example.com with the name/IP address of server B, and entering server B’s password where prompted):
  ssh serverb.example.com
  mkdir .ssh
  exit
  scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@serverb.example.com:/root/.ssh/remotekey
  ssh root@serverb.example.com
  cd .ssh
  cat remotekey >> authorized_keys

  exit


• Now typing “ssh root@serverb.example.com” from server A should automatically log you in.

So how to defeat this problem?

Simple, use:
find . -name "*" -print | xargs rm
or, if you just want to delete the files starting “unwantedMail”, then use:
find . -name "unwantedMail*" -print | xargs rm