I just wanted to drop a short note to let you guys know that I am ok - still very busy, but besides that ok - and will return to posting to the site more regularly very soon. I am in a middle of a complex move for a big client that takes almost all my time. The good news is that during this move I will document many of the things I will do, and will post them to the site, (about new server setup, testing and benchmarking). Hopefully you will find some interesting and useful stuff that will result from this :-)…
During this time I was not able to focus on writing new articles, but at least I have tried to reply to all the questions that I received on the older posts.

Cheers,
- Marius -

During the last couple of weeks I have been so busy (as you could have easily seen from the lack of time to dedicate to this site), than I have ever been in my life… I will not bore you with details on what various projects I had to complete and deadlines to meat, but this has always been the same in my life: at some point I will feel so overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do, that I will think that it can’t get any worse than that, and that I will soon collapse from so much work. But as many other peoples might have seen themselves, after some time I will adapt to the new changes and start doing the same amount of work in a much sorter time and reach to a point where I will feel again ‘on top of things’. I am heading now to such a period again but as usual this will not last very long as the work will again increase and challenges will change leading me to a never-ending cycle (my working life).
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Exactly 3 months ago I have written the first post on this site… this is the 100th post and I will try to present here my impressions after all this time.

1. Blogging is not easy… before starting this site, I thought blogging is something easy. I have learned that this is not quite like that. There are just so many ideas and cool things to write about, but I don’t always have the mood to write. Sometimes I will be really stressed after some work problems and I would just prefer to read something and not concentrate on writing. Definitely writing in English that is not my primary language, makes this a little more complicated. Still I am trying to overcome this and write only when I feel like writing even if this means that I am not posting so regular as in the first days.

2. Do I care what others say? the answer is definitely yes, I do care. After some of my posts were featured on some big sites I have been shocked by how mean some peoples can be. But I have learned that if I want to continue doing this I need to become immune to such things. Now I just don’t care about this anymore and definitely the kind words of peoples that found my posts useful helped me a lot.
When you start blogging you just don’t expect to see peoples stealing your content and making really mean and useless comments… this is the downside of having a post featured in many places and read by many different peoples; some will like it and find it useful, other will just trash it without considering the feelings of the person who wrote it. I assume that this is the reason for many peoples that start blogging to stop after just a few months. Anyway myself I moved over this: as noted previously I am not submitting any stories to digg (all my posts that were featured there lately were submitted by someone else) and also I am not reading ANY comments posted on sites outside my own. I just don’t care… I am writing for fun and from the feedback I got so far, many peoples found some useful things on my blog so this is all that matters.

3. Stats: for the peoples who care about this in 3 months this site has served 113,511 unique visitors (with an average of 873 visitors / day) and over 160,000 page views. Also after the second month the site received a good google pagerank (PR6) and one post even PR7. There is an average of 350-400 peoples reading the site using various RSS readers.

4. Advertisements on the site: I must say that I was surprised by the results obtained from advertisements. This is definitely not something to replace my job or anything similar but at least the site pays for its hosting and this is really cool. Actually after seeing this I have decided to move on a dedicated server, were I will consolidate some other projects I am working on. I have tested various other advertisements besides google adsense, but so far they just didn’t come even close to the results of adsense. Once I have seen how they work I have dropped them completely. Google adsense rocks compared to other systems.
When you are clicking on advertisements you are supporting this site. I am trying to get as much as possible relevant ads and filter out unrelated or spam sites that might be shown by some programs.

5. New server: as I said before, I have completed the move on a dedicated server. Nothing fancy (this is a Pentium4/1GB RAM/80GB HDD), as I was trying to keep this around 100$/mo. Still I am very satisfied about this move and I have concentrated here some other projects I am working on. After this move I have prepared several posts that document some configurations done on the new server.

6. Changes on the site: I am planning to do various changes on the site in the near future… I am looking to replace the wordpress theme used now but have not found something particular that I like yet (still searching); also I am looking to implement mail subscriptions (using feedburner probably). Also some other small updates and changes in the plugins used.
For now I have completed some updates like: the site is now running on my own dedicated server where I am using now Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5 as opposed to the pervious hosting account where it was running on CPanel with apache1/PHP4/MySQL4.1. Also Wordpress is the latest stable 2.0.4.

As a conclusion to this post I would like to thank to all the peoples that have send me feedback on the site, and also to all the users that have subscribed to my RSS feeds or browse the site daily. Thank you very much. Your kind words made me continue with the site and I hope that you will enjoy my posts also in the future and find out interesting things.

Thank you,
- Marius -

I have just noticed many referrals in my webserver logs from NewsForge and so I have seen that my small article “Linux Tips: take control of your bash_history” was featured there. Nice! Good for my budget that this was not on slashdot.org as that should have over killed my bandwidth allocation for sure :-).
Anyway many thanks for the person who has submitted it.

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/05/19/1718216.shtml

I would like to thank to all the peoples that have added their comments on that post as this has added much more value to the article. I will take some time in the next days to add to the article itself the additions I will consider useful. Thanks again!

Update 20060607: I will try to keep this post updated with my articles that were featured on NewsForge’s frontpage:

May 22nd, 2006: Moving your website to another server? Tune your DNS for minimum downtime.
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/05/22/1341244.shtml

May 29th, 2006: Backup your MySQL databases automatically with AutoMySQLBackup
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/05/29/116229.shtml

May 31st, 2006: Managing Apache2 modules the Debian way
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/06/05/31/1614216.shtml

Cool! I have just seen that my article “Linux Tips: take control of your bash_history” was featured on the front page of linuxtoday.com.

http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006051700726OSHL

Many thanks to the person who has submitted it!

Update 20060607: I will try to keep this post updated with my articles that were featured on linuxtoday.com frontpage:

May 23rd, 2006: Linux Tips: The Proper Way to Allow Regular Users to Run Commands as Root
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006052300526OSHLSW

May 23rd, 2006: Moving your website to another server? Tune your DNS for minimum downtime.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006052300726OSHLNT

May 31st, 2006: Backup Your MySQL Databases Automatically with AutoMySQLBackup
http://www.linuxtoday.com/storage/2006053100426OSHLSV

Jun 1st, 2006: Managing Apache2 Modules the Debian Way
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006060100826OSDBSV

Wow… 10 days have already passed since I have started this site. I have learned many things during this time… and here are some thoughts and conclusions I have reached:

1. The site obviously got some attention… I would say that 12,252 unique visitors in the last week show this, right? Quite impressive I would say. This was obviously achieved as a result of two stories reaching the frontpage on Digg:

• Linux Tips: take control of your bash_history:
  397 diggs 101 bookmarks@del.icio.us
• Linux Distributions Trends:
  360 diggs 14 bookmarks@del.icio.us

2. About Digg: I was very excited about Digg… I thought that having a visual representation on how many peoples liked a story is great. But, there is just too much flame on Digg… Too many peoples were just making comments for the sake of making a comment and hurt my feelings. I assume that this is very normal when many peoples see one article and there will always be some ones that will say “Hey I knew this… This is something very simple and is not worth anything”. I am sure that there are many peoples that are very good in Linux and even if my site is not intended for the first time Linux users, I would have not expected such reactions. Obviously a super Linux sysadmin has not much to learn from here (as probably from nowhere else, as he knows everything already, right?), but still… so much flame… So I have decided that for the time being I will no longer submit any of my articles to Digg, and just keep an eye on the site and get to learn more about it.

3. About the comments on the site: I wanted to allow any comment on the site. To have anyone’s real feedback and not censor it in any way. This of course without the normal spam that gets deleted… But after seeing what are the opinions of some peoples, I have decided to change this. From now on, I will no longer approve any comments that have no value to the site. So if you are going to say something like: “Hey, this is something I know already” or something similar, that brings no value to the site, don’t bother, as I will no longer accept it. If you have something to say that is useful, or if you have a real question, please do that and I will approve the comment as soon as possible, but if not, stop wasting my time. Also I will go over the old posts and clean them up of the useless comments (sorry for the peoples that will get their comment deleted or not posted, but if you want it here try to post something useful to others).

4. I have decided to go for an Google AdSense account. I am fully aware that the community of Linux users that will be looking at the site are not very common to click on the advertisements, but this big traffic means extra costs for my hosting package. So I am not hoping to get rich from this, but if I will at least be able to pay my hosting than I will be very satisfied. :-).

Please let me know of your opinion. Let me know what you have liked on the site, or what you would like to see on it in the future. I promise I will read your feedback with attention and try to follow the good ideas.

Thanks,
- Marius -

Yesterday my story “Linux Distributions Trends” made it to the front page of digg.com. What is the effect of that? What can you expect from having your story for a few hours on the front page of Digg? I have read of others experiences about the “digg effect” and they are all true… Here are some thoughts from my own experience.

So, what can you expect? Well the answer is a huge spike of traffic. In the next hours your web server will be hit very rapidly by many simultaneous requests. So if you are not ready to handle thousands of hits (this will depend from your topic and area of interest) then you are in big trouble. For my own site this was not a problem and handled everything very well (and frankly the traffic was not really that big), but this is hosted on a dedicated server in a highly respected US datacenter. The server is highly optimized to handle a huge load, and it is also serving several other high traffic sites. A site not prepared to handle this will probably be easily taken down by this kind of traffic.

Now some numbers from my experience that looked interesting to share:
5,053 total unique visitors
2,673 visitors while on the front page (about 4 hours)
Top countries:
United States: 48.80% - no surprise here
United Kingdom: 8.23%
Canada: 8.17%
Browser Versions:
Firefox: 76.55% !!! very nice
IE: 7.79%
Operating systems:
Windows: 64.40%
Linux: 24.81% ! nice

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Welcome to MDLog:/Sysadmin! This is the home page of my personal weblog that will contain information about various sysadmin related stuff. In case you want you can find some info about me here.

Does the world need another blog? Most certainly not, but hopefully this site will be helpful to other peoples that are facing the same problems I have already solved. At least I will have an online journal where I will try to post regularly the things I have done, the challenges I have passed, and this will be useful for me in the future to review my past works.

What can you expect to find here? Well anything related to sysadmin tasks. Mostly related to Linux, and Debian my personal favorite Linux distribution at this time. Also RHEL, Fedora, Centos will have some place as I have various clients that I work for, with those distributions.

If you believe that this site would benefit from something from your own experience, or you would just like to have me write about something particular, please use the contact form. I promise that I will try to respond timely to all requests that don’t look as spam.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my site,
- Marius -