Mark's Blog

A lot has been written about Wordpress tuning. Unfortunately utilizing CDNs with Wordpress is despite a few plugins still fiddly and requires modifications to themes, links and the such. Yet even a lot of plugins don’t correctly link to their JS files, resulting plugins such as My-CDN not being able to rewrite all links.

Therefore I have written a plugin to hook a rewriter into PHPs ob_start(). Without going further into technical detail, it lets you use a CDN for your Wordpress blog within minutes.

Download the “OSSDL CDN off-linker” here: Wordpress Plugin page.

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Tags: CDN, cloud, know-how, nginx, PHP, server, systems architecture

To admit it, I was inclined to title this post “from Europe/Russia with love”, but technology should not be seen national and nginx, Varnish and MonetDB are few of many products I am going to mention.

Here’s “nginx” pronounced like you would say “Jeanny”: “Jeannix”.

Let me turn tendencies into trends and provide me you with what I call the weather forecast of technology: Read more »

Tags: apache, GNU/Linux, monetdb, MySQL, nginx, python, server

Having only one IP I had to share the HTTPS port so depending on the request’s host either the Linux VM or Exchange 2007 should be queried. Unfortunately, although Exchange can be configured to process requests on another port Outlook and Pocket PCs will not work that way.

Therefore I’ve first set up Apache’s mod_proxy on the Linux VM to proxy Exchange – which did not and does not and will not work due to RPC over HTTPS, which Microsoft is said to have created standards incompliant. Apache’s developers refuse to implement an exception [the bug report], and versions of httpd newer than 2.0.53 won’t work, including my 2.2.8.

Unlucky me I did not recogize this only testing access to OWA. Hence my apologizes here to all affected.

ISA 2006 does not work with Windows Server 2008, and the new version requires too much overhead for my taste. BTW, it is referred to as ‘Stirling’ and a beta can be found here.

Finally, I’ve decided to give Squid a try. And, after reading just a few example configurations (and this) I managed to get it working. It proxies successfully to MS Exchange, and by letting Apache bind to 127.0.0.1 for SSL even the host-based (“vhost”) relay works. Here you can grab my configuration file squid.conf for proxying/relaying between Exchange and other hosts.

If you know what to change to access Exchange by SQUID without SSL please let me know. (Altering cache_peer line will let squid access only Apache and thus break host-based relaying.)

Tags: apache, exchange, server, Squid

As yearly fees for servers in Germany increase I have decided to run my own home server. My needs are not that high to reason a dedicated machine, and I win a workstation. And, after all, I already had to setup a broadband connection at home.

You are charged 0.20€ (about 0.25 USD) per kWh here [German Market History, mirror], therefore energy efficiency is very important. And, AMD64 servers are efficient.

Therefore my old Celeron D 2.2 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM rented server will be replaced first weekend in December by my new 2.2 AMD64 Quadcore w/ 8 GB RAM. The big chassis already contains a suitable motherboard with four Western Digital WD6400AAKS (review at PCGH) hard drives, so I need RAID…

(BTW, the whole system is nearly unhearable. A big Scythe Mine and two SFF21 produce 0.5 sone at 60 Watts (idle). System is 26°C, HDDs 34°C and CPU 28°C.)

Tags: RAID, server