It’s been a very long time since I’ve updated my blog, and many things have happened during this time. As most of my friends and readers know by now, we moved to the States last year in December (about 5months ago), and this has been an amazing time for us with many changes in our lives. I could describe it as a full reload, complete reset, start from scratch, and so on. But it has been a great experience so far and we enjoy it and definitely have no regrets. We now live in beautiful California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Cupertino.

I’ve been lucky to have my brother (that is living in the States for many years now), help me out initially, and after that had great support from my US friends that perviously I knew only from Skype calls and emails. It was amazing to meet up with people I knew for many years but only ‘virtually’, and they have all been great and I am really thankful for all their support. It has been very hard to leave back home our family and friends, but again Skype to the rescue, and now we use it in the different direction (taking with people back home), and it has been an invaluable tool during this time.

I’m really excited to live in a place where most of the interesting ‘things’ in the tech field are happening, and I’ve already started getting involved in several meetups and conferences, and I expect that with time this will only become more and more interesting. Exciting times are coming in our field, and sysadmins/devops/webops will see a dramatic shift in their work in the future, as we move into cloud computing and automation.

I’m also very happy that I can now interact directly with my clients, going to their offices and having meetups in person is definitely a much better experience. I’ve been working for a long time remotely and this has definitely its advantages and I still work for much of my time remotely even now, but being able to speak and meet with people is definitely a much better experience for any consultant. I’ve also been very lucky to work on very interesting and challenging projects, and with the very best and smartest engineers in the industry, and this makes it even better.

Now that things are starting to cool off a little, I hope to be able to return to my blog and have the time to write about some of the exiting things I’ve had the chance to work on lately, like configuration management and automation with chef and bcfg2, scaling high traffic sites, cloud computing using amazon ec2/s3 and eucalyptus, but also about normal stuff that happen during the day of a sysadmin.

Recently I started using twitter more and more. It took me a while to understand its usage, but today I think of twitter as a very useful tool to quickly communicate and receive news. Instead of blogging about some news I find it much easier (and faster) to tweet them. For example:

• Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r8 eighth update: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090408 #debian #etch #
• Results for #Debian Project Leader 2009 Election: Steve McIntyre was reelected for another year! http://is.gd/s2xV #

could have been the subjects of a new blog post, but now twitter feels much more natural to share such news, that don’t really need a blog post.

Moving forward, I thought that bringing this information from twitter to my blog in a weekly digest blog post would be something cool, and users of my blog not using twitter could find interesting. I setup the wordpress plugin called “Twitter Tools” to do just that. Yesterday the twitter digest post was published and I was looking at it and it was not looking so good; it was just a list of thoughts that were not related, and were either outdated or taken out of some discussion had in real-time on twitter; it was useless…

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This is my first blog post of 2009 and I just wanted to do a quick review of my past year blogging and also compare it with 2007. My general feeling before doing this, was that even though I have tried to dedicate more time to blogging, work and personal things haven’t allowed me to do this as much as I wanted. But let’s see the raw numbers and then draw a conclusion.

I posted exactly 91 articles during 2008, meaning an average of 8 per month. This sounds very low from the rate I am trying to achieve, but still it is a good improvement compared with 2007 when I had posted only 42 articles. The enthusiasm (and the extra time available I had back then) from my first year of blogging – 2006 – with 139 posts is still far away. I am definitely aiming for 2009 to be my best year in blogging (and not only ) and this should be doable with a little more dedication.

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Christmas is coming, and I just wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers and visitors of my blog. I wish you all a great holiday with your friends and family, and see you next year!

Best Regards,
- Marius -

“Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users.”

I’ve just finished enabling gravatars on my blog, and this was as simple as adding the gravatar code in my theme. Starting with WordPress 2.5 gravatars are enabled by default without any additional plugin needed, and you only need a compatible theme to start using gravatars. This was not the case with my theme so I had to add a simple code to enable this:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '32' ); ?>
There are other parameters you can use, and they can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Gravatar

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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