Technology Blog

• @mediatemple anyway to do traffic shaping on dv boxes? Or better yet, can you downgrade our port speed to 10mbps? #

• @mediatemple dropped the ball. No support on our issue and then they slap us with a $900 bill instead of addressing our concerns. Very poor #

• @projectmag we sent someone to the parsons – not there!! Did you guys stop because of the rain? #

• When will ie7 die? #

• Happy thanksgiving all!!!! #

• Check out Creating Digital client Debragga.com featured on NBC New York: http://bit.ly/93Ug5D #
• @debragga congrats on the NBC Spot! #

So some of our firewall’s have a default policy of dropping any packets which are not allowed for. This causes a problem when you flush the whole firewall, as now you have zero allow rules and a default policy of drop. That’s right, it means you’ve just locked yourself out of the server!

I always forget how to flush a firewall safely with defualt policy of drop. I know you have to set it to accept, put always forget that the switch is -P. The below will work for setting the default policy of the three main chains and flushing the firewall:


/sbin/iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -F


APC also known as Alternative PhP Cache is an easy way to speed up and optimize performance on your webserver.  We recently installed it on a server that was spiking to 40.00-80.00 load and have seen the server serve files quicker and only spike to a 2.00 – 4.00 load during peak times.  This server was sending out an application on the Zend Framework which is notoriously heavy – so it was good to get such a big speed and optimization boost.

How does apc work? Well for those of you not familiar, everytime a php program is called, a text file is compiled into c code and then executed by the server. On desktop apps, and other programming languages usually this code is pre-compiled and ran everytime. (Think about an EXE file – there is no way to see the lines of code that make up the file.) Well what if we saved this compiled code and skipped the whole step of compiling it every single time a user request the same page. Well apc does this!

To install APC on a redhat/centos based machine is super easy:

yum install php-pear
yum install php-devel
yum install httpd-devel
yum install apr-devel.x86_64

#check /etc/php.d/apc.ini


After that you can even do a `locate apc.php` and move this file into a web servable directory and you will see charts that will show you all kinds of neat statistics about its performance.

Cpanel Log Location Poster

Coming from a plesk background, I always have a hard time finding the location of Cpanel’s log’s.  Today while looking for where cpanel keeps it’s access logs I stumbled across this poster now available by cpanel.

By the way the location for the apache logs is:
/usr/local/apache/logs/{DOMAIN}


A new (minor release) version of Cufon is available.  This new version is 1.09i and fixes IE9 Beta support for cufon.  You do not need to re-upload your fonts and create new cufont.font.js files, you will only need to replace the standard cufon-yui.js file on each of your sites.  We just rolled this fix out to over 20 sites in under an hour.  Will you be updating your sites?

There are also some other ways to fix cufon for IE9 if you are unable (or unwilling) to replace the js file.

<!--[if gte IE 9]>
<script type="text/javascript">
Cufon.set('engine', 'canvas');
</script>
<![endif]-->

Alternatively, you can always force ie9 to render as ie8 or ie7:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />