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Category Archives: Technology

How to limit website visitor bandwidth by country

This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks.
If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if you [...]

How to handle 1000’s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS

There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget:
The first [...]

No-latency SSH sessions on a 5Ghz WiFi router with 250mw radio

Disclaimer: You may brick your fancy new Linksys router by following the advice in this blog entry. A large number of folks have installed this software successfully including me. But consider yourself warned in case you’re the unlucky one.
I use SSH a lot. My wife and nephew love streaming video like Hulu instead of regular [...]

What the Web Sockets Protocol means for web startups

Ian Hickson’s latest draft of the Web Sockets Protocol (WSP) is up for your reading pleasure. It got me thinking about the tangible benefits the protocol is going to offer over the long polling that my company and others have been using for our real-time products.
The protocol works as follows:
Your browser accesses a web page [...]

Routers treat HTTPS and HTTP traffic differently

Well the title says it all. Internet routers live at Layer 3 [the Network Layer] of the OSI model which I’ve included to the left. HTTP and HTTPS live at Layer 7 (Application layer) of the OSI model, although some may argue HTTPS lives at Layer 6.
So how is it that Layer 3 devices like [...]

How to upgrade your server BIOS on Linux without a floppy drive

This is another thing I just couldn’t find no matter how hard I googled. Here’s the story behind this post. Scroll down if you want to get at the useful stuff.
I run a cluster of Dell 2950’s and I just ordered second CPU’s (Intel XEON E5410 64 bit) for all the machines. I test upgraded [...]

Linux is Obsolete!

A lame video on techcrunch today inspired me to go hunting for the original argument between Linus Torvalds and (Professor) Andy Tanenbaum and here it is. Titled Linux is Obsolete, it’s a post by the author of Minix in 1992 telling Linus he’s just created an obsolete OS that’s running on obsolete hardware (the 386) [...]

Anycasting anyone?

[Thanks Sam for the idea for this entry] Ever heard of IP Anycasting? Thanks to my recent change from godaddy (frowny face and no link) to dnsmadeeasy (happy face and they get a link) I’m now using a DNS provider that provides anycasting. What is it and should you care?
IP Anycasting is assigning the same [...]

Microsoft Buzzquotes

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when [...]

Server Downtime == Police Baricades and Angry World Series Fans

Paciolan is managing ticket sales for the Colorado Rockies. Their servers were hit with over 1500 requests per second and it took down not only the Rockies ticket sales infrastructure, but all Paciolans other customers too.
They claim to have been hit by a DDoS attack, but that’s something that’s hard to prove or disprove when [...]