21 Oct 10 Amazon free cloud service
To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.
15 Oct 10 2010 Cloud Computing State of the Union
Cloud computing and virtualization are two of the major IT trends of this decade. They are the reason this blog, and many others like it, was started. With that in mind, Zenoss released The 2010 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Survey results. The survey was designed to collect information on the use of virtualization and cloud computing technologies among enterprise users.
Over 200 IT professionals were surveyed during the 2nd quarter of 2010. Highlights from the survey include:
- 40.7% indicated that they preferred to deploy servers virtually, 29.3% indicated they used virtualization whenever possible
- The leading virtualization technology used by respondents was VMware that was in use by 79.3% of survey respondents who were using virtualization
- 43.3% of participants indicated flexibility as the reason for using virtualization while 33.3% indicated hardware savings as a reason for using the technology
- The number one stated goal with regards to virtual infrastructure was Cost Savings (64.7%) followed by Deployment Control specifically controlling virtual sprawl
- Security was the number one concern for cloud computing followed by management and monitoring
View the full report at Zenoss.com.
20 Aug 10 Display Chinese Characters in WordPress
By default, Chinese characters do not work in WordPress if you didn’t originally setup your WordPress to handle it. To display or compose Chinese in your blog, you can change the WordPress database Collations to utf8_unicode_ci for all tables. If you have phpMyAdmin, you can manually change them one by one. However, it will take long time to fix all of them. Here is an easy way to change all Collations using script.
1. Create a file as: alter_mysql_tables.php
2. Copy and paste the following lines to the file and modify it using your own database connection
02 Aug 10 WordPress Permalinks
By default, WordPress uses URL with question mark and its post ID. After enable Pretty Permalinks, all the posts give 404 error. At first, I thought it’s .htaccess problem, however this file was updated automatically after applied the changes. After searching Wordpress documents, I found that it also requires FollowSymLinks option and AllowOverride FileInfo directives in Apache configuration file. I never knew this since shared hosting server has those options enabled by default. On VPS server, I have to configure by myself.
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories).
(more…)
31 Jul 10 Install FFmpeg, Mplayer, Mencoder, FFmpeg-PHP on CentOS 5.x automatically
Test environment : cPanel 11.25.0-R46156 – WHM 11.25.0 – X 3.9
CentOS 5.5 i686
1. cd /usr/src/
2. Download ffmpeginstaller 3 series Latest Stable Release at here
wget http://mirror.ffmpeginstaller.com/old/scripts/ffmpeg3/ffmpeginstall.3.2.1.tar.gz
Note: ffmpeginstaller 3 scripts will install stable versions of all binaries. ffmpeginstaller version 4 will install all latest dependencies of ffmpeg and mplayer, and also use svn version of ffmpeg and mplayer. Version 4 and 5 may cause problem on your VPS. I recommend you install Version 3. (more…)
30 Jul 10 Backup MySQL databases automatically on your VPS
A nice bash script from SourceForge to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases.
Features:
– Backup mutiple databases
- Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB
- Compress backup files
- Backup remote servers
– E-mail logs to you
- More…
Here are the steps to run this script on your VPS/Dedicated server:
