MarkMaunder dot com

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: […]

December 1, 2009 | Scaling, Startups, Technology | 2 comments

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 […]

October 27, 2009 | Technology | 1 comment

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 […]

October 25, 2009 | Innovation, Technology | 1 comment

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 […]

October 20, 2009 | Linux, Technology | 3 comments

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 […]

November 12, 2008 | Technology | 4 comments

Linux is Obsolete!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 Titled Linux is Obsolete, it’s a post by the author of Minix in 1992 telling Linus he’s just created an obsolete OS that’s running on obsolete hardware (the 386) […]

March 26, 2008 | Technology | No comments

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 […]

March 24, 2008 | Startups, Technology | 1 comment

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 […]

December 16, 2007 | Tech News, Technology | No comments

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 […]

October 23, 2007 | Tech News, Technology | No comments

MacBooks auto-detect crossover/non-crossover ethernet modes

I take my dev server and my workstation everywhere with me in a single small backpack. My “dev server” is an intel macbook that dual-boots Linux and OSX. My workstation is a windows laptop. Most of my work is done with the macbook booted into Linux and my windows laptop running an SSH client that […]

October 1, 2007 | Technology | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.