Over the past few days, we realised that, for various reasons, our Sphinx search process (searchd) would occasionally not be running. As Sphinx is pretty much the backbone of our sites, we couldn’t have this happening. I wrote a small script that runs permanently, checks if searchd.pid exists (you can have it check anything) and [...]

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Recently I was trying to upgrade using Yum on my Fedora 9 machine and I got an awful message that I did not have enough space to complete the upgrade. What the hell? My / partition has a huge 10GB, how can this be so?
[root@Garth Download]# df -hFilesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/sda2             9.5G  [...]

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grep is a file content searching tool for Linux. It is loved by programmers for its ease of use and swift search results (with customisable output). For example, if you forgot where you left your debug code, you can quickly display a list of the files that contain the code like so;
grep -ril ‘var_dump’ *

But, [...]

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A lot of people these days use graphical clients for creating their database schema’s and therefor start with the Entity Relationship diagram and then have it generate the SQL for them. I prefer to write SQL directly as I seem to have an ongoing misunderstanding with most graphical clients but then I would need to [...]

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I am setting up a local development server at work as our main development server is in Melbourne and we have no root access (so permissions changes on directories can take days, literally, before they are actioned). I am using debian as it is the OS used on the main dev server (if it was [...]

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No developer likes to merge their code in with other code after finishing a big project. Its a royal pain in the ass. I find myself having to do it at work a lot (we have a largish team) and at home because at home, I somehow find that I have 84 copies of the [...]

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I own and run a fairly large site (www.skylinesaustralia.com) and have recently decided to give up the dedicated server it has been running on and move to a managed solution with mosso.
The problem for me was that mosso do not yet have ssh access due to their network config and this meant that I [...]

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