The control panel we use, Interworx, comes with djbdns as its DNS server. djbdns is actually a suite made up of several separate servers, the two main ones being tinydns for iterative (non-recursive) lookups and dnscache for recursive lookups. Other DNS servers, like BIND, support combining the iterative and recursive DNS servers in to one but djbdns requires them to be split apart for various reasons. This blog post is about improving DNS performance with dnscache but if you’ve never looked at tinydns, you should check it out, it is a nice lightweight DNS server that is easy to manage. It has its quirks but is still nice.

By default, when dnscache is set up, it acts as a recursive lookup server which is bad for performance. Every single server will walk the DNS tree to get a record for www.example.com. It will ask the root servers for the name servers of .com, then the .com servers for name servers of example.com, then the example.com for the A record of www.example.com. All of this takes less than a second usually and it will cache all of the results it gets but every single server is still incurring an delay to look up common records.

Continue reading →

There a lot of ways to use PHP with Apache, with the most popular probably being mod_php due to its ease of use. However there are many problems with mod_php both security and performance-wise and other solutions have been created over time to address those problems. PHP-FPM (PHP FastCGI Process Manager) is one of the newer PHP SAPIs and generally is (from our initial testing) an excellent combination of the performance of FastCGI and security benefits of suPHP. Unfortunately the setup can be somewhat confusing so I’ll walk through the process on 64bit CentOS 5.

The first step is install mod_fastcgi (replace lib64 with lib if installing on a 32 bit system):

curl -s http://fastcgi.com/dist/mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz | \
tar xzf - && cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.6 && \
make -f Makefile.AP2 top_dir=/usr/lib64/httpd && \
cp .libs/mod_fastcgi.so /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/ && \
cat > /etc/httpd/conf.d/mod_fastcgi.conf <<EOF
LoadModule fastcgi_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_fastcgi.so

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
    AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
    Action application/x-httpd-php /php.fcgi
</IfModule>
EOF

Continue reading →

There was a time when you could Google my name and see an entry titled “Greg Swaney is what customer service should be”. That was the coolest thing I’d ever seen the first time I came across it. It told me a couple things. 1) I seemed to be doing things right in our help desk. and 2) Someone cared enough about the help that I gave them to write an article on their personal blog about it. I was amazed. In addition to the article, this particular client, Robbi Behr, also created a card especially for me and sent it to me.

The way I looked at our help desk wasn’t just a job that I reported to, but an experience. Granted, this was many years ago when we were smaller and I was one of the only techs responding to support tickets, but my job was to help people. It wasn’t just to fix someone’s site, that was merely a byproduct. Someone was in trouble and as far as I was concerned each ticket in the help desk was another call to the bat phone – another signal in the sky and it was off to the rescue. I loved what I was doing and it only drove me to be the absolute best I could be at it. You never see Batman scoff when he sees the bat signal in the sky or hears a damsel in distress. He was on it as fast as he could be and he wasn’t doing it for the reward but rather because he was bent on helping people. That’s just one of the few things Batman and I have in common but we’ll save that for another post.

Continue reading →

When I was first approached to write a blog post I said to myself, this can’t be yet another technical article. Yes, the technical posts we write are informative; after all we are a hosting company! A hosting company that prides themselves in the quality of service we give. I wanted to emphasize that the Nexcess team is a particularly diverse group. Our teammates come from all walks of life. Some of us enjoy the outdoors and all it has to offer, while some prefer the rush of an intense Modern Warfare match, the energy of a live DJ set in front of a bunch of fans, or simply the novelty of a cosplay meetup. I personally love to cook; I find it to be quite therapeutic. Also, I love to feed off the smiles and complements I receive from my amazing friends and family that enjoy the fruits of my labor!

In case you are not familiar with hummus, it is a vegetarian dip made from chickpeas, lemon, tahini (Sesame Paste) and a touch of sumac. Chickpeas are rich in protein, iron and vitamin C and are a good source of fiber. You can thank wikipedia for that bit.

So lets get a few things straight, blue hummus? Really? Is this hummus coming from James Cameron’s Avatar? Well, if you are familiar with Nexcess, you’re familiar with our obsession for everything sky blue, and the idea of making sky blue Nexcess hummus sounded like an amazing treat for the office! The question is, how do you take a delicious golden paste and turn it in to a blue delicious paste while using only natural ingredients? Well, it’s much easier said than done. It’s hard to find anything edible in nature with a blue hue to it. That is, unless you want your hummus to taste like blueberries. After some research I discovered Blue/Purple potatoes. Naturally, I came to the conclusion that if I were to cook a blue potato and add it to a batch of home made hummus it would turn the paste blue.

Continue reading →

I started using Ubuntu in 2009. By the following year I had dropped the dual boot with Windows XP and was completely Ubuntu. When I hit a glitch during an update in 2011, I figured I would re-install with the latest version – 11.10 at that time. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the major change they had done to the desktop environment by the name of Unity. Sorry Ubuntu, you lost me.

There are a number of “Unity hate” posts out there and that’s not the point of this one. I’d like to share with you what I eventually did as an alternative to Unity in the hopes that it may be a good choice for you too if you’re looking for one. Continue reading →