Yesterday I received a notification on my Samsung Galaxy S4 that an update was available for my device. To my surprise Samsung made Android Lollipop available for my S4 so I wanted to install this. Unfortunately the amount of free diskspace was not sufficient to complete the upgrade so I had to do some cleanup. First I looked for an app that could show me a clear overview of my storage use. After 2 tries I found the app “Disk…
Read moreMigrating Varnish 3 vcl to Varnish 4
I’ve been running Varnish 3 for a while now on my own server and I have created a general configuration for my setup. I also use this configuration as some sort of template if I have to configure Varnish for a client. Recently I had to setup and configure Varnish 4 for a new project. I was eager to test if my previously created configuration for Varnish 3 would work with the new version. Fortunately there is a way to verify if…
Read moreApps and tools I use on my Mac
About 7 years ago I started using Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) after buying a used iMac. It started out as pure personal use for checking my mails and surfing the web. Later on I got a MacBook Pro from my employer and I started using this magnificent piece of hardware on a personal and professional basis. At this moment I’m a Linux System Engineer and consultant for some years now and I have gotten used to working with Mac…
Read moreOut with the iOS, in with the Android
The numbers I’m going to start off by giving you a few numbers. I have had an iPhone since the midst of 2009 and an iPad since the end of 2010. Up until now I owned the iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and iPad 1. I have been an iOS user since it was still called “iPhone OS 3.0”. I have been working with Mac OS X since 2008 on several Macs and MacBook Pros. I still own an…
Read moreHow to purge the Varnish cache
Edit: This guide was created using Varnish 3, it is possible that some action will not work with Varnish 4. In one of my previous posts I have guided you into configuring Varnish for WordPress websites. One of the main purposes of Varnish is caching and it is great at it. Yet you may come into a situation where you would want to view the actual site, page or file instead of the cached version of it. Developers for example…
Read morePHP-FPM on Apache with split configuration per site
While configuring this very server I kept in mind that I would want to host multiple sites on it. I wanted to be able to configure PHP settings on a per site basis instead of modifying the global PHP configuration for the entire server. I also wanted to make sure that every site/user had its own permissions and thus wasn’t able to screw things up on my server in case of a successful break-in attempt. And of course I also…
Read moreVarnish config for WordPress
The server that hosts this website was configured from the ground up by myself. The purpose was to configure a server with a rather limited resource set that was able to serve a few websites without handing in on performance and page speed. One of the ways to maintain a good performance of the server and websites is to ease the web server from its tasks by implementing a caching proxy. In this case I used Varnish Cache to accelerate…
Read moreConfigure Ruby on Rails with Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
The configuration of a new Ruby on Rails (RoR) environment has always been a bit of a struggle thanks to mongrel, mod_ruby,… but thanks to Phusion Passenger the configuration and deployment of RoR applications has become an easy job. I will describe how to configure Ruby on Rails with Phusion Passenger on a Debian (Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.4 (lenny)) server.
Read moreMac OSX slow, caused by aslmanager
For a while I had been experiencing random slowness on my iMac. This slowness could only been solved by a reboot of my iMac but this was just a temporary solution. I didn’t look for a specific cause until it began bothering me for a while and I had the time to look into the issue. I opened my activity monitor (be sure to select “All processes” from the dropdown) and I noticed that a certain process called “aslmanager” was…
Read more