Previously I discussed how to install Drush 6.x for use with Drupal 7. Here we’ll install Drush 8 for Drupal 8, specifically using Ubuntu 16.04 Server. The recommended method is to install using PHP’s Composer. First we install Composer itself: Then, install unzip to speed things up: Installing and Testing Drush 8 Install Drush 8.x: […]
As mentioned in my Ubuntu 16.04 and Drupal 7 article, the Ubuntu 16 LTS version has some nice upgrades, including PHP 7, MySQL 5.7, Nginx 1.10, Apache 2.4.18, and MariaDB 10.0.x. Let’s see if we can make it work with Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, and Drupal 8, using the Redis key-value store as the backend cache […]
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been out for a little while now, and its standard repos offer some nice enhancements over Ubuntu 14: Apache 2.4.18, PHP 7, and MySQL 5.7.12 The process for creating a basic LAMP web server is also streamlined, as a couple of bugs that plagued Ubuntu 14.04 are now eliminated. To create […]
The Drupal 8 version of this article can be found here. As of today, April 21, 2016, Canonical has released Ubuntu 16.04 Server, supported until 2021. Ubuntu 16.04 has some nice enhancements, and some changes that will affect sysadmins and developers: it ships with Python 3 as the default Python, plus PHP 7, MySQL 5.7, […]
A list of Linux performance monitoring tools for CPU, disk, memory, networking, and debugging. CPU, Memory, Disk Monitoring sar and iostat are part of sysstat and available in most package repos. `sar -switch 1 3` means “perform the test three times at one-second intervals”. List processes by CPU/mem usage: $ htop Show CPU usage, all […]
This is a shorthand summary of web server performance and caching systems as of March 2016. General disclaimer: I try to link benchmark results that seem relatively neutral, but as with any survey or study or benchmark roundup, the most pertinent question is cui bono? Ultimately the only reliable benchmarks are those you run yourself […]
The only method I use to securely erase hard disks is ATA Secure Erase using the hdparm utility. Be sure to read the disclaimers and warnings at kernel.org carefully, since secure erase doesn’t work with all configurations and may brick your drive. The primary benefit of ATA Secure Erase is that it erases 100% of […]
Basic CentOS 7 Kickstart installation script for setting up servers automatically. To use, create a bootable disc containing the script below in the /isolinux directory and type linux ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg at the boot: prompt. #version=RHEL7 # System authorization information auth –enableshadow –passalgo=sha512 # Use CDROM installation media # cdrom # Use network installation repo –name=base –baseurl=http://mirror.oss.ou.edu/centos/7.1.1503/isos/x86_64/ […]
The Zend OPcache is a caching system that seeks to improve PHP performance by keeping precompiled PHP code in the shared memory of your web server. Since PHP is an interpreted language that has to be compiled into a set of intermediate instructions (“opcodes”) when someone accesses your PHP page or site, not having to […]
This article describes some of the basics on installing and running WordPress to maximize its performance. The following scripts and text generally assume Debian/Ubuntu, so substitute Red Hat, Arch, etc. as needed. Installation If you’re less lazy than I am, you could combine the whole install routine into a single Bash script, and make it […]