WordPress and UW Groups

March 29, 2013

By nikky

Get­ting Word­Press to see your UW Groups An item that’s been on a lot of wish­lists of a lot of peo­ple for a long time now is the abil­ity to have Word­Press and the UW Groups Ser­vice com­mu­ni­cate with each other. Most of my own pur­suit of the issue revolved about using the groups REST… Read More

Server Timeout Changes

January 8, 2013

By nikky

We’re low­er­ing our Apache time­out val­ues to 60 sec­onds on the depts/faculty/staff/courses servers, effec­tive imme­di­ately: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#timeout This may be decreased fur­ther as required. This change will improve avail­abil­ity and respon­sive­ness dur­ing high-traffic sit­u­a­tions by more quickly clear­ing out Apache threads which are not serv­ing data or await­ing a TCP response from a client. This should… Read More

Scheduled ovid01 Reboot — 2012/09/11

September 7, 2012

By nikky

[This mes­sage is being sent to mem­bers of the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list, as you wished to be noti­fied of MySQL server updates and reboots. ] Out­age Infor­ma­tion —- There will be a brief out­age to restart ovid01.u.washington.edu on 09/11/2012, as out­lined below: Sys­tem: ovid01.u.washington.edu Planned date of out­age: Tues­day, Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2012 Time: 07:00am Esti­mated out­age time:… Read More

@reboot and Cron

September 7, 2012

By nikky

As I’ve writ­ten before, shep­herd­ing cron on our shared UW host­ing sys­tems is one of the most inter­est­ing aspects of my job. I had a ques­tion today from some­one who noted that they had @reboot for some mysql.starter scripts, and */5 or */15 for oth­ers. Here’s my response: The */5 (every five min­utes) and */15 (every 15 min­utes)… Read More

Drop-In Alternatives to MySQL

August 22, 2012

By nikky

As part of UW-IT’s quar­terly “leap for­ward” day, I spent part of my time explor­ing alter­na­tives to MySQL. Here’s my brief write-up on what I learned, which is adopted from our inter­nal pages. MySQL is used very often on UW-IT sys­tems and around cam­pus, with over 1,000 indi­vid­ual MySQL servers being run on the Shared Host­ing… Read More

Reddit and Servers

July 27, 2012

By nikky

Arriv­ing back at my desk at 1:30 after a deli­cious lunch and almond bub­ble tea, I noticed quite a few tick­ets in my queue that all had a sub­ject line akin to “OMG SERVER SLOW!!!! ?!??!!?!! DEPTS SLOW!” Check­ing my email, I noted a few alerts from our ser­vice cen­ter about slow web­site response times,… Read More

Welcome to WordPress 3.3!

April 26, 2012

By nikky

We’ve moved the UW Blogs Net­work to a new data­base host and upgraded Word­Press to 3.3. Enjoy the newer stream­lined admin­is­tra­tive inter­face, includ­ing the enhanced media uploader!

ovid21 rebooted 2012-03-24

March 26, 2012

By nikky

Ovid, the sys­tem that sup­ports many MySQL servers, was rebooted Sat­ur­day. I’m includ­ing a mes­sage sent to the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list, which includes addi­tional infor­ma­tion. You can sign up for the list here to receive noti­fi­ca­tions in the future; http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/mysql-users-ovid [This mes­sage is being sent to mem­bers of the mysql-users-ovid mail­ing list because you asked… Read More

Briefly Exploring Ruby

February 29, 2012

By nikky

Today, the most illus­tri­ous of all days, UW-IT staff explored new tech­nolo­gies, con­cepts, and ideas that they’ve been mean­ing to do but were always delayed due to more press­ing mat­ters, oper­a­tional con­cerns, or pri­or­i­ties. I decided to explore Ruby and how it inter­acted with our Uni­form Access sys­tems. Com­ing from a Perl and PHP back­ground,… Read More

SQLite

December 30, 2011

By nikky

Dru­pal 7 and Medi­aWiki 1.17 both con­tain out of the box sup­port for SQLite, which is an open-source RMDBS intended for easy setup and light­weight use with­out sig­nif­i­cant over­head. Although I don’t men­tion it in our web pub­lish­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion,  SQLite is sup­ported on our uni­form access sys­tems. If you’re look­ing to test out Medi­aWiki or Dru­pal,… Read More