Sysadmin

Update: Mosso was rebranded as The Rackspace Cloud in June 2009.

Update 1 Jan 2010: It looks like Rackspace has fixed the problem with Mosso's Scheduled Tasks. Anonymous' comment tipped me off that you can now set the command language to http, then enter your site's cron.php as the command to run.

From mydigitallife.info:

1. SiteUpTime - Free account monitors 1 service from 4 monitoring location at the frequency of 30 or 60 minutes with email alerts.

According to MachTech and summarised by MacDailyNews:

• Boot Camp is faster for simply running Windows
• When running Mac OS X and Windows together, you get the best performance using XP
• VMware Fusion and Parallels generally have similar performance
• Parallels is generally faster than VMware Fusion when using XP

Another great article on the johnandcailin.com site:

Never loose your data again: backup remotely using rsync ssh and rdiff-backup

We've recently been asked by a client to look into creating a Drupal installation that can cope with heavy load. Here's some useful instructions from johnandcailin.com.

I'll post a follow-up in the near future explaining what we ended up doing and how successful it was.

• Scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites

Some people are having problems with the latest Mac OS X 10.4.11 update.

"It's been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that's not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don't really understand how and why it's put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb."

A primer for lsof ("list open files"):

lsof: The Most Powerful Unix/Linux Command That Nobody Ever Uses

Also includes primers for:

• Tcpdump

"FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN."