About a week ago, my website and email vanished off the face of the internet. I think this deserves a certain amount of explanation, lest someone think I’m incompetent in my own field. Not too long ago, I switched off my colocated server because I don’t need my own personal machine for two websites, a couple very small databases, and a low-volume email server. I didn’t downgrade fully to a shared host because I run a Django app, Wordpress, PostgreSQL, MySQL for the afore mentioned Wordpress content, Postfix to better control my blacklists, with Postgrey because greylisting kills an assload of spam blacklists would miss, etc.
With the introduction of PostgreSQL 8.4, Bruce Momjian, a significant core developer, contributed a tool that can actually upgrade an entire database cluster in place. The time required is essentially only that necessary to copy the data files from the old installation to the new one. On a quick RAID system, this can be an order of magnitude faster than a dump/restore. The main drawback is similar to Slony: disk space must effectively be doubled for this upgrade method.
I was fighting with packaging some software at work, trying to produce a workable RPM package to replace the manually installed kludge currently polluting one of our servers, and discovered the --spec-only option to the bdist_rpm action.
Now, this particular option only makes sense since a spec file must be generated for bdist_rpm to work anyway, but I never thought about it. What it provides is an awesome shortcut to doing packaging slightly more complicated than merely relying on what bdist_rpm produces.
PostgreSQL can be both a beautiful thing, and an infuriating mess.
Occasionally I look through the logs on one of our database servers to see if I can’t optimize some queries. It’s good practice, and is an excellent way to monitor basic system performance by watching for queries that take longer than might otherwise be possible. Sometimes performance can be fixed by tweaking an index, or manually rewriting the query and convincing a developer to integrate the changes.
Over the fourth of long Fourth of July weekend, I decided to experiment with some of the other Linux distributions floating around out there. I made only stipulation: I use a netbook, therefore the distribution must install from a USB flash drive. I have an old 1GB Sony, and a newer 2GB Sandisk, so there’s no reason this should be a difficult task. I told myself, “Self, 2009 is halfway over.
