Speed up exim

I received an interesting challenge / request to speed up a clients server that runs the email marketing tool, Active Campaign.

One of the first things I did was move the Exim queue to SSDs.

Thereafter I pushed the following settings, to Exim.

root@mailserver ~ # cat /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-deliver_speedup
# THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY DISTRIBUTED BY PUPPET.  ANY CHANGES WILL BE
# OVERWRITTEN.

deliver_queue_load_max = 20
queue_only_load = 20
split_spool_directory
queue_run_max = 150
remote_max_parallel = 200
smtp_connect_backlog = 50
smtp_accept_max = 500
smtp_accept_queue_per_connection = 2000

On going live, we have identified that the client can deliver 90 000 newletters in under two and a half hours.

HTH
Brent

Gnome 3 mouse focus

One annoyance I have with Gnome 3, and not easily available to fix, is the need to click a window to change the focus.

I prefer to have the focus of my windows to follow the mouse.

I used the tool dconf-editor

I found the config lives the path in org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences

Tick 'auto raise'
Right click on 'focus-mode' and select 'mouse' .

HTH
Brent

RAID Disk Space Calculator

http://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator.php

HTH
Brent

Check if system is 32bit or 64bit

Im always looking for cleaner ways to get the architecture of my running host for my scripts.

Here is some commands Ive come across.

arch
getconf LONG_BIT

and then the classic

uname -m

HTH
Brent

Sometimes you may want to know what the state of an Ethernet card is. But lets say you don't have root, to use tools like ethtool or mii-tool.

Heres a quick tip

grep ''  /sys/class/net/eth0/*
/sys/class/net/eth0/address:00:1b:21:6a:85:d6
/sys/class/net/eth0/addr_len:6
/sys/class/net/eth0/broadcast:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
/sys/class/net/eth0/carrier:1
/sys/class/net/eth0/dev_id:0x0
/sys/class/net/eth0/dormant:0
/sys/class/net/eth0/duplex:full
/sys/class/net/eth0/features:0xba9
/sys/class/net/eth0/flags:0x1003
/sys/class/net/eth0/ifindex:2
/sys/class/net/eth0/iflink:2
/sys/class/net/eth0/link_mode:0
/sys/class/net/eth0/mtu:1500
/sys/class/net/eth0/operstate:up
/sys/class/net/eth0/speed:100
/sys/class/net/eth0/tx_queue_len:1000
/sys/class/net/eth0/type:1
/sys/class/net/eth0/uevent:INTERFACE=eth0
/sys/class/net/eth0/uevent:IFINDEX=2

HTH

Brent

pbuilder set proxy

I have always dabbled with Debian package building. And the tool of choice is pbuilder.

I now learnt that even if you have an proxy set in your /etc/apt/preferences, pbuilder does not look at that.

If you are like me, and stuck with cheap DSL, you may be forced to run an apt-cacher. That way you don't need to waste valuable bandwidth on already downloaded packages.

But in order to make pbuilder make use of your apt-cache, you just need to set this

export http_proxy=http://your-proxy:8080/ in ~/.pbuilderrc


 HTH
Brent

Quick install of SourceGuardian on Debian Sqeeze

This is a very *quick* howto, to install SourceGuardian on your Debian server.

First go to SourceGuardians download page
Untar the tarball

cp ixed.5.3* to /usr/lib/php5/20090626/

Create  /etc/php5/conf.d/sourceguardian.ini and add

[sourceguardian]
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626/ixed.5.3.lin

And that should be it. You can double check by running

root@chs-bld03-v:/tmp/SG# php -v
PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze14 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Aug  6 2012 14:18:06)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies
    with SourceGuardian v8.2, Copyright (c) 2000-2010, by Inovica Ltd.
    with Suhosin v0.9.32.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2010, by SektionEins GmbH

(you may need to restart apache2)

HTH
Brent