jotango's questions

our marketing droids would like a blog on our domain. I checked out several, and while MovableType seems to have the least vulnerabilities, Wordpress has won the race.

I am very sceptical of installing a software tool which is exploited this often on our main servers. However the powers that be want the url of the blog to be www.domain.com/blog/ instead of blog.domain.com (which would of course allow me to run the blog on a cheap VPS somewhere).

I can always install Wordpress, run through the hardening and hope for the best. Or does anyone have an idea how I can run the blog in a subdirectory while keeping it separate, without impacting the functionality? I was playing around with proxying in a htaccess etc. without results. We are running LAMP and have a BIG IP load balancer in front, if that helps...

I am scared of attackers reaching our database through Wordpress (despite me using typical precautions like different usernames).

Any ideas?

I am currently building a NAS for about 24 TB of storage. Video files, slow access, long term storage. No performance issues.

I am currently undecided between buying a JBOD case and installing OpenSolaris (because of ZFS), or purchasing a Nexenta license. The difference is about $ 12.500 for licenses over three years.

What would you see as the main advantage in purchasing a nexenta license, beside the support? Did nexenta really enhance the basic OpenSolaris, or is it just a lot of marketing speak? No one really wanted to answer that question.

P.S. With the nexenta license pricing I am even thinking of going with Windows Storage Server.

in our company we pull in inventory files from third parties. These files are in a fixed format, containing the 13-digit EAN (think UPC code) as well as other data. I also have a master list of EANs in our database.

I would like to compare the master file with the new file and remove all lines from the new file, which contain an EAN, which is not in the master.

Example: Master
1234567890123
4567890123456

New file 1234567890123 4567890123456
5678901234567 <- remove this one

The new file contains data other than the EAN. The EAN is in the first column. The data is tab-separated.

I am currently doing this in PHP. The problem is both files have about 4 mn. rows each and my script is consuming a ton of memory. I currently load the whole master list into RAM and do isset()s.

Are there any smart linux tricks/programs which could help me?

I ran the excellent MySQL performance tuning script and started to work through the suggestions. One I ran into was

TABLE CACHE
Current table_cache value = 4096 tables You have a total of 1073 tables. You have 3900 open tables. Current table_cache hit rate is 2%, while 95% of your table cache is in use. You should probably increase your table_cache

I started to read up on the table_cache but found the MySQL documentation quite lacking. They do say to increase the table_cache, "if you have the memory". Unfortunately the table_cache variable is defined as "The number of open tables for all threads."

How will the memory used by MySQL change, if I increase this variable? What is a good value, to set it to?

this is not strictly a server admin problem, but one I (as an admin) am tasked to resolve. Marketing wants to send out coupons with our packages. The code I thought up was something along the line: HITS-#MERCHANT#-#COUPONITERATION# So we can track which merchant sends out how many coupons (or at least how many are redeemed) and which iteration performs well. For every combination of the above I will be needing maybe 2.000-5.000 coupons. Unfortunately digitally printing 2.000 coupons is about as expensive as 5.000.

I would like to get 10.000-5.000 blank coupons and print the coupon code on them here in the office. I have several questions:
- is it feasible to run 2.000 coupons and add the codes with a laser printer? is this economical? - are there dedicated printers for this type of thing? label printers don't really work I think (imagine all the peeling) - how do "professionals" do this kind of work?

Thanks for any tips and help!

Thank you for the great advice!

It sounds like this is luckily a common problem, which should be outsourced to a specialist company. I have spoken to a few in the area. The number of coupons I was talking about is not very interesting to them, but they will accept an offer like this to get a new customer.

Regarding the data transfer, as long as the data size allows it I will generate a large PDF, as was suggested here. It is a bit of a waste, not just transferring the text information, but up to maybe 200-300 MB the companies are happier with that method.

Thank you again for your help!