In a previous article I have shown how you can install memcached from sources, and also how you can install it from debian packages. If you are running RHEL or Centos you have one other choice besides installing memcached from sources. This article will show how you can easily install memcached 1.2.2 and libevent 1.3b using DAG/rpmforge repository. Read the rest of this entry »

Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is a great piece of software that was designed with performance in mind. Still, memcached has little (or should I say none?) security features built-in. If we run memcached on a public ip and unprotected, anyone will be able to reach it and make memcached connections. This guide is intended to show some simple steps that can be used to secure your memcached setup.

You might say that you are not saving any private information in memcached and just cache parts of your public pages. Well, even in this case you will want your memcached daemon protected and not open to DOS attacks. Basically, regardless of the data you will cache (even if this is public or backend sql private data), you will probably want to control who can access it and since memcached doesn’t have any built-in authentication and doesn’t require any user or password we will have to use external protection methods like a iptables or other firewall rules for protection. Read the rest of this entry »

This article will explain how you can install the latest memcached daemon (including the libevent library) on a linux system. The only prerequisite for memcached is libevent so we will have to install this first.

Note: the output of the commands in this article are taken from a Debian Etch system. They should work on any recent linux distribution, but depending from your version you might need to make some changes. The versions of memcached and libevent used in this article are the latest stable one existing at the time this was written. Check the download pages bellow, and if newer versions exists you will probably want to use them. Read the rest of this entry »

This article will show how we can install updated versions for memcached (and libevent) for Debian Etch, by backporting the packages from debian testing. Why would we want to do this? Because the versions shipped with Etch are old, and accordingly to the software creators should not be used as the new versions provide much better performance and reliability:
libevent: version in etch: 1.1a (released on 2005-06-12).
memcached: version in etch: 1.1.12 (released on 2005-04-04)
Read the rest of this entry »

I am using on several projects memcached and on the application side the php memcached module. This can be installed as any pear/pecl module, or from source by downloading the source .tgz and running the classic phpize; ./configure; make; make install; While trying to upgrade the memcached module to the latest version available 2.1.2 I encoutered a problem, receiving an error during the compile step:
“configure: error: Cannot find php_session.h”

Read the rest of this entry »