Upgrading PHP: I started down this path: http://jazzymarketing.com/main/0811/upgrade-php-51-php-52-centos but found that I kept getting dependency conflicts: –> Missing Dependency: libltdl.so.3()(64bit) is needed by package php-mcrypt-5.3.2-1.el5.remi.x86_64 (remi) php-mhash-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.x86_64 from remi has depsolving problems –> Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.10-1.el5.remi is needed by package php-mhash-5.2.10-1.el5.remi.x86_64 (remi) php-gd-5.3.2-1.el5.remi.x86_64 from remi has depsolving problems –> Missing Dependency: libt1.so.5()(64bit) is [...]

I am always amazed at some of the small things that I think would be easy to find a solution for, seem so ellusive. Today, I needed to run a quick mysqldump of a 100MB database, and I needed to compress it on the fly to gzip so I did not end up with 2 [...]

I am still so happy that WordPress is still so easy to upgrade. I did mine today in 5 minutes as stated. I wish all my upgrades where this easy.

Recently I ran into issues where a web application running on Tomcat 6.0 was crashing due to load spikes in requests. What I noticed in the diagrams below, was there was no issue with CPU or Memory, but rather issues with GC cycles and high Thread count/spike causing the Tomcat instance to become unresponsive and [...]

In the journey of rebuilding my dedicated server to create a  secured cloud server, I was trying to find out what are the potential issues, besides network intrusion through various ports, and services on my server. I found numbers ranging from 70% to 85% of all intrusions actually occur by way of applications. Specifically, I [...]