Darryl Hein's questions

I'm looking to start using an SMTP or mail relay service. I've found quite a few out there, but I'm not sure if there are advantages to one vs another. The only requirements I have are:

• can send "from" more than 1 domain (possibly >20 for all the different sites I work on)
• can pay for a higher limit (I may need to send as many as 15000 in 1 day, although the average is <500)
• can send from PHP (although I doubt this will be a problem as most are compatible with any language)

I'm okay with an SMTP service, mail relay service or a site that uses a custom API, although an API would make the conversion more difficult.

Mostly I'd use the server for sending out individual emails, like a registration confirmation or similar. Although once in a while, I might need it to send out a mass email to up to 15000 email addresses.

Reasons for wanting to do this:

• I don't want to host any mail services my self as they just cause head aches
• I don't have to worry about being blacklisted. If they are blacklisted they will know about it and have the knowledge to get it fixed.
• Reporting on if emails have gone through would be nice.

I have a pfSense box that I'd like to add squid to to use as a proxy that I can use remotely. I have installed squid, but I can't figure out what firewall or other settings I need to change to get it to work.

I'm wondering if there is a way to log commands received by the server. It can be all SSH commands, as long as it includes information on commands related to file transfer.

I'm having issues with an SFTP client and the creator is asking for logs, but I am unable to find any existing logs.

I'm looking to log on both or either CentOS or OS X (although I suspect if it's possible, it'd be similar on both).

My difficulty: I connect to a variety of servers through SSH, sometimes more than 7. Currently I have doing this through OSX's Terminal with shell commands, which works pretty good, except for the fact that I gotta remember the address, username and port everytime I connect and often I'm typing the full command (because it's too far back in the bash history).

So, I'm wondering if there is a program or script that just runs commands in Terminal that can store the connection information, just to make life a little easier.

I am trying to determine what happened on a server where MySQL started responding with too many connections for almost an hour before we had to restart the server because MySQL would not restart itself, nor could we kill it.

So my question is once a MySQL server/instance has reached its maximum number of connections, will it refuse connections until it's restarted or will it automatically allow more connections once the number of connections has dropped below it's max?

Although the site has some pages that connect to MySQL for an extended period of time and have queries that take sometimes more than 30 seconds to complete, I would have assumed that once complete, even with extremely high load (for this site anyway) MySQL would have continued accepting new connections once the load was reduced again.

The too many connections error page on the MySQL website doesn't mention anything about what should happen.

I often have 5+ screens open for monitoring the server within one screen and it's somewhat annoying to have setup them all up again after a system restart. Usually there is 1 top process and a few tails for watching log files.

Is there a way to have screen automatically open a number of screens with certain commands executed in each scren?

Any ideas how to resolve the error that shows up in the Mac OSX system.log file? Or even what the error means?

I have the following cron job that runs every minute:

* * * * * cd /Library/[...]/report/ && nice -n 15 /usr/local/php5/bin/php -f report_generator.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Searches around the internet mentioning commenting out the cron job, but in my cause I can't do this. Most of Google's search results also don't have conclusive mention of what the error actually means.

The full error is:

Jul  2 14:50:00 xserve2 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10c3f0.cron[46328]): Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access

Mac OSX 10.5

I have a server that has a PHP MySQL extension version 5.0.77 while the MySQL version is 5.1.34. Some pieces of software/scripts are warning me that I may have problems.

What kind of problems should I expect and should I be concerned about it? (I'm not running any fancy MySQL queries/commands through PHP.) Is it big deal?

We don't feel like recompling PHP with a newer version of the library and the server admin really had no idea how (although I could probably figure it out).

What configuration options for MySQL provide the biggest speed improvements?

I'm wondering about actual configuration file improvements, table types, hardware setups, replication, etc. Anything other than the query structure and table structure (these are easy to find on the website and Stack Overflow). Are things like query cache settings what gave you the most speed? How about drives; is it better to have it on an external RAID or internal? Did replication give you better performance, especially with read large queries?

What other settings/changes have you made to improve the performance of MySQL?

Note: I realize these are very usage dependent (that is, small website vs data warehouse), but as I think most of us probably work on a variety of sites/systems, it's good to know a variety of techniques that can apply to different situations. Also, I think some techniques can be transferred between situations.

The problem I'm having is on a server (and other OSX boxes as well) we have 4GB of RAM, but we are finding that OSX only uses 40-60% of the available RAM while also having a 6-7GB swap. The server is running Apache and MySQL while the other machines are desktops.

I have been comparing it's usage to similar Linux boxes (hardware and software) and finding that Linux is typically using 80-90% of the RAM and has a much smaller swap file (2-3GB). The Linux servers also typically run much faster.

Is there a way to force OSX to use more or most of the RAM before using a disk swap file?

In Windows you can actually disable the swap altogether. Is there something similar for OSX?