It's the little things.

[reddragdiva]

• Anti-gay Christian charity funds 17 MPs' interns. In case you wondered where the weird fundie influence in UK politics of late is coming from.

• Rocknerd: The Sisters of Mercy, Corner Hotel, Melbourne, March 1st.

Things you don't want to discover on migration day: that a pile of particularly important DNS entries have somehow acquired a TTL of 509171 seconds. What the arsing fuck.

If you're running WordPress with a cache in front (we use Varnish), put your site's name in the actual server's hosts file pointing to itself. Else idiot extensions talking to themselves will send requests out to the cache and back again. Our new network setup led to this not working, meaning /wp-admin timed out.

(Mystery meat networking. Rule 1 is "there's always another cache", so rule 2 is "there's always another firewall.")

If your site serves a ton of JavaScript, serve it via a cache. Else clients hold onto the connection while they're digesting the JavaScript and hammer the shit out of Apache. We took our load from 750 connections to 20.

If you're using /etc/cron.d, the name of a crontab file can't have a dot in it. WHY?

(I don't mean the technical reasons. I mean how the hell that can be justified.)

Linux does threading differently to Solaris, every socket uses a file handle and Java uses lots of sockets internally. This means a ulimit -n of 256 on Solaris becomes 8192 on Linux.

Tomorrow is my last day at work for two weeks. My goodness I need a rest. My boss needs one more — I have strongly suggested he takes a break in April before he explodes.

Comments

[eagle]

The no-dot thing is fallout from packaging systems. They all like to save various discarded or backup copies of configuration files in the same directory, and they all like to use extensions with a dot, like .dpkg-new or .rpmsave. So distributions tend to patch cron to ignore everything with a dot in it, since the list of possible extensions that correspond to files that shouldn't be active and that you don't want parsed as actual cron jobs is ever-growing and ever-changing.

I'm actually mostly okay with it because I like having the package-shipped alternatives to the current config files right there in the same directory for easy diffing, but it's ridiculously surprising the first time you encounter it.

[reddragdiva]

That's shading more toward "excuse". /etc/apache2/conf.d (as Debian has it) doesn't behave this way, for example. (It excludes files with a ~ on the end, which is disconcerting the first time but the rationale is obvious in hindsight.)

[(Anonymous)]

Debian carries a 60-line patch against Apache to ignore specifically the dpkg files. I suppose that Debian could do that for everything.

[eagle]

Debian carries a 60-line patch against Apache to ignore specifically the dpkg files. I suppose that Debian could do that for everything.

(Sorry about the previous anonymous comment.)

[reddragdiva]

BUT THIS FREE THING IS IMPERFECT!

[greylock]

The Sisters review suggests that it took one and a half gigs to get better since the first night at The Corner was aurally awful.
That's pretty damning.

every socket uses a file handle

[ewx]

Something's off there; a socket is a file descriptor like any other on both platforms and counts against the 'ulimit -n' limit.

Re: every socket uses a file handle

[reddragdiva]

So why did the same stuff running on Solaris do okay with 256, when a Linux box needed 8000? (Apart from all software sucking.)

Re: every socket uses a file handle

[ewx]

Some difference in the JVMs used?

Re: every socket uses a file handle

[reddragdiva]

Sun Java 6u24 on Solaris, Sun Java 6u30 on Linux.

[pndc]

If the thing querying your A record is Internet Explorer, it's ignoring the TTL and you'll need something listening on both the old and new IP addresses for a while anyway. A HTTP redirect to the dotted-quad of the new box is a kludge, but cheap.