I usually manage website deployment with bash scripts that run remote commands on the servers

In order that I can see what is going on and debug any errors verbose output is useful.

Running "bash -ex" causes each line to be output as it progresses and halt on any error so that you don't miss it.

within the remote command "set -x" cuase bash to echo all commands

One of those posts for myself in case I need to come back to this later

I have a new PC which is very fast apart from problems with disc access seeming slow (and the disks being physically noisy)

The following related links led me to try a solution

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-843292.html

http://marc.info/?l=linux-raid&m=128506852210452&w=2

/etc/fstab

UUID=317f7912-9956-41f1-9855-7bee69c950b3 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,barrier=0 0 1


NB adding barrier=0 here seems to have solved the problem

The music player banshee which is part of the default Ubuntu setup pops up a message each time a new track starts playing.

To turn this off

1. Open Banshee
2. Go to Edit, preferences, extensions
3. Enable Notification Area Icon
4. The Icon should now show up - right click on it
5. Uncheck Show notifications
6. Disable the Notification Area Icon again

Very annoying - the option to turn off notifications is hidden on a menu you can't get to by default.

I want the drupal user uploaded files to be manageable by both apache and a non-root user

In my case I'm using hudson to rebuild the site with data and "files" from live periodically.

So I have added the apache group to the hudson user

and set the umask for apache so that files are created group writebale

For Redhat

For Debian/Ubuntu

echo "umask 002" >> /etc/apache2/envvars

It wasn't immediately obvious to me

What I needed to do to get blutooth audio working was to install the blueman package

After that configuration via GUI was pretty straightforward

Now I have fantastic sound via my bluetooth enabled HIFI :-)

The default configuration of varnish logs every request twice, once for the client and once for the backend communication

edit the line in /etc/init.d/varnishncsa to something like

from the varnishncsa man page

-c Include log entries which result from communication with a client. If neither -b nor -c is specified, varnishncsa acts as if they both were.

To setup an IP based access control list so that only allowed users may access the site.

In my case I need to be able to test a dev site but don't want to make it public, we tried using password authentication but that made it harder to test varnish as the authentication headers affected caching.

Installing Ubuntu on a new netbook proved remarkably easy once I got past a couple of hurdles

I'm using varnish to cache a REST service that's slow enough to cause me grief in development.

Out of the box it assumes you are caching your own server and that the client is already using the right host header.

To specify that it should use a host header to match the backend I'm using a config like

When I installed my system I wasn't quite happy with the way the installer divided my hard disk - but at the time I was in a hurry...

I have since found that repeated loading of databases during development used up all available space in /var and debug files were filling /tmp

So I had to figure out how to resize them.

Thanks to 

http://blog.dhampir.no/content/resizing-an-ext3-filesystem-on-an-lvm