DevIssues

Upgrading PostgreSQL to a major version can be a challenge but isn't difficult. You need to plan ahead and do some testing afterward, but PostgreSQL includes everything you need to make the change almost seamlessly. I give you a step by step rundown of how to make the upgrade and gain all the benefits that come with a new Postgres version.

Redirecting requests for the non www version of your domain to the www version only can help to boost your SEO, eliminate duplicate search engine entries and improve your ranking. And it is easy to do with Apache and mod_rewrite.

Following up on Running Postgres with Daemontools - Shutdown Errors, the Postgres mail list had some advice on monitoring and automatically restarting Postgres.

Running anything under daemontools seems like a great idea, but I've had a particularly bad time trying to shutdown postgres under daemontools while running Apache and PHP with persistent postgres connections.

In a recent article titled "Submitting POSTed HTML Forms and Registering Variables in PHP" we examined a better way to treat tainted POST variables passed to your PHP script from an HTML form. We decided to create an array called $FORM_FIELDS that would contain only the names of the elements that we wanted in our new array thereby cleaning up all fields in one statement (loop) and omitting unwanted fields from becoming part of memory.

You just finished your install of Apache, PHP and APC cache on a VPS and you're beat. You spent about a day going over every configuration and compile option trying to eek performance out of your VPS machine and web server. Then you take a look at the output of top or ps and notice, hey, my Apache process is 150 Megs! Well isn't that grand....

While doing a software upgrade on a server today I ran into some problems. Apparently Drupal 4.7.4 and PHP 5.2.1 don't work together.

After upgrading PHP, Apache and APC cache I couldn't get Drupal to work on all 7 sites on one machine. I could login to any drupal site as the admin and get shown my user page, but when trying to do anything at all as an authenticated user it considered me logged out.

I initially thought APC had something to do with it and began to disable it. That didn't fix it. On a haunch and after a lot of reading with no answer I decided to install a lesser version of PHP and that fixed it. PHP 5.1.1 was laying around and did the trick. Unfortunately I needed 5.2 to fix a mem leak!

I really would prefer to have my own server but sticking a box in colo is expensive. Where I live, getting access to the physical colo space would be nearly impossible too. As a result I run on a VPS. Unfortunately VPS has some horrible limitations depending on who is on the box with you.

Recently I decided to move my personal blog off of b2evolution and stick it on Drupal. Too bad drupal is such a resource hog. Most CMS and blog software is though and it is really hard to find a minimalized, optimized blog software that uses any form of caching. Today, it hit the skids and my patience hit the wall. Argh!

Today I got caught up in PostgreSQL. A feature didn't work as planned and when the mailing list responded to my plea for help it turned out the feature didn't work fully in my version of Postgres, v.8.1.4.

Sad to say, I haven't compiled a pgsql version for 13 months. I got so lazy that the last time I installed on my dev machine I just used the package that came with Kubuntu. Now I'm in a bind. I have a production machine and a dev machine to backup, upgrade and restore.

I learned one important lesson in this and that is to name your postgres installation directory the same as the current version. That kind of goes against my best judgement but it means that you can run two Postgres instances beside each other. Why would you want to do that? Take this line from the upgrade instructions:

When I moved my server a little more than a year ago I decided that I would try to get away from System Admin tasks by offloading services where possible. The first one to go was DNS. DNS is simple to manage, but just one more thing to look after. I had bought into the marketing hype about having off-site DNS so I decided to try a third party DNS. Unfortunately, having a service that many people rely on for ALL their services is just a target for attackers. After several DDos attacks with at least two providers I decided it was time to manage my own DNS again.

After my DNS was all setup I decided to retain those other third party people for my DNS secondary. After nearly a week of frustration I discovered one very important thing - not everyone that CAN program a computer SHOULD program a computer.