Optimizing your environment can be quite time consuming and overwhelming since there are an overwhelming amount of configuration options, a number of supplementary packages to evaluate, and a lot of trial and error to determine which knobs and dials provide the most bang for your buck with your environment. Here are the variables and settings we found the most useful to focus on:

Apache

Since Small instances only include one CPU, turning on KeepAlives seems to be a good idea. You’ll also want to adjust the “MaxClients” prefork setting, which seems to be the most important of these. Ours is set to 75, but it doesn’t seem that the defaults are a horrible mismatch, so you may not find that tweaking these makes a lot of difference. Enabling the deflate module works fine, and you can lower the “Timeout” value if you don’t want to do business for the default 300 seconds (our is set to 30 seconds).

PHP-FPM

Figure out where the FPM log file resides, and learn to monitor it for notices about the pool being busy, timeout values being hit, etc. This will sort of give you a “hot and cold” sense as to how the following settings are working. In Debian be sure that you edit any corresponding php.ini configuration options for FPM (/etc/php5/fpm) and not for Apache (i.e. PHP running as an Apache module), CGI, or CLI.

• pm.start_servers = 4
• pm.min_spare_servers = 4
• pm.max_spare_servers = 20
• pm.process_idle_timeout = 5s
• pm.max_requests = 100

Monitor your RAM consumption and lower these values to ensure that as memory balloons that you do not have to use swap space. The max_requests setting is particularly helpful since it helps prevent memory ballooning from leaky PHP scripts. If you use a service like Monit you can make use of the “ping.path” argument to help monitor FPM and auto-restart it when it becomes unresponsive. You can also enable the slow log (“request_slowlog_timeout”, “slowlog”) if you wish to profile certain sites or certain PHP scripts.

APC

Last but not least, refining APC was by far the most beneficial to dropping load averages from as high as 20 to consistently below 1. For whatever reason, while the PHP-FPM default settings were too high for our environment, the “apc.shm_size” default setting in particular seems ridiculously low, and perhaps should be increased as to be more useful. To determine how well APC is working for you, you should track down an “apc.php” file which provides a handy stats page showing how many requests have been served via memory (i.e. are taking advantage of APC memory cache). For whatever reason this file is not included in the Debian package, so I compiled the APC package and copied the file to my server:

cd APC-3.1.9
phpize
./configure --with-php-config=/opt/local/bin/php-config
scp apc.php yourserver:

These instructions are for OS X and Macports, you’ll have to modify the path to php-config and/or phpize to suit your environment. If you are seeing tons of fragmentation and APC not being fully utilized being displayed on apc.php, increase the “apc.shm_size” value from its default 32M to something like 256M. Note that in Debian this path is “/etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/apc.ini” – again, there are separate config files for each of Apache (i.e. PHP running as an Apache module), CGI, CLI, and FPM.

Unless you are a pretty experienced Git user, updating your yui3-gallery fork for a new Yahoo CDN pull request can be tricky. Here is one way you can do this, the following steps assume that you have defined the official yui3-gallery Git repository as a remote source in your repository entitled “upstream”:

1. remove your stuff that was a part of your last CDN pull request residing in the “build” directory (i.e. rm -rf build/gallery-yourproject)
2. git commit -a to commit this deletion to your repository. Your commit message can be something along the lines of “preparing for new git pull from upstream”
3. git pull upstream master
4. this will generate conflict messages about how your build files were “deleted in HEAD and modified in <some git rev>”, but you’ll notice that it also says that the git revision was “left in tree”.  You’ll notice that a fresh copy of the build files for your deleted project lives in your build directory now
5. git add build/gallery-yourproject to add this back to the repository
6. git commit -a to save the results of this merge
7. git push to push your changes up to GitHub

On this new site you can learn about the group’s history, its numerous recordings and videos, the instruments they play, acquaint yourself with the current and past membership, keep informed as to when they will be performing near you, access a wide range of press materials including posters, cover artwork, ringtones, learn about what the group has been working on in the area of education and outreach, access their store, or their exciting blog entitled Brass Underground which documents their experiences on the road and provides a special glimpse behind-the-scenes.

We are pleased to announce that the classical music giant, Canadian Brass, has recently launched its new website. If you are no stranger to classical music or brass instruments, you have no doubt already heard about the Canadian Brass and their decades of history and presence in the musical world. The award winning group has been going in new directions as of recent years, so therefore it seemed fitting to create a new website to express this new vision!

On this new site you can learn about the group’s history, its numerous recordings and videos, the instruments they play, acquaint yourself with the current and past membership, keep informed as to when they will be performing near you, access a wide range of press materials including posters, cover artwork, ringtones, learn about what the group has been working on in the area of education and outreach, access their store, or their exciting blog entitled Brass Underground which documents their experiences on the road and provides a special glimpse behind-the-scenes.

This website incorporates many NetMusician technologies, including (in no particular order):

• Facebook and Twitter integration
• WordPress/NetMusician integration
• The NetMusician Webkit Database Manager (information about this forthcoming)
• The NetMusician Mobile-friendly Media Player (which continues playing the track you were listening to as you move between pages of the website, and works on iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices)
• The NetMusician Webkit Newsletter integration
• The NetMusician Webkit Discography module
• Facebook-style links to reveal more news postings (as well as a searchable news archive)
• And more!

Please check out their site, and be sure to follow the group on Facebook and Twitter!


mysql> use [your WordPress database];
mysql> select option_value from wp_options where option_name = 'wordpress_api_key';


Since so much software is tracked using a Git repository on Github using public repositories, this can make for a very useful software update mechanism.

The first thing you’ll need to do is find your project on Github, and clone the entire thing to a local directory, e.g.:

git clone git://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git phpmyadmin

Then, since you probably don’t want to be using the very latest development version, find out what tags are available:

git tag -l

Check out the version you want to its own branch:

git checkout -b versionnum [tag_name]

This will checkout that version as its own branch and make this branch active, so that the code that resides in this directory corresponds to this tag. You can then take this directory, copy it, export it, rsync it, whatever to wherever you need this.

Convert from H.264 or WMV to WebM (requires ffmpeg)

Adjust the bitrate to your liking

`which ffmpeg` -y -i /path/to/h264/file.mp4/or/file.wmv -acodec libvorbis -b 1500k /path/to/webm/output.ogv

Convert from WebM or WMV to H.264 (requires ffmpeg)

Adjust the bitrate to your liking

`which ffmpeg` -y -i /path/to/webm/file.ogv/or/file.wmv -acodec libfaac -vcodec libx264 -b 1500k /path/to/h264/output.mp4

 Convert to OggVorbis from MP3 (requires mpg321)

`which mpg321` -q /path/to/mp3file.mp3 -w – | `which oggenc` -Q -o /path/to/output.ogg -

Convert from WAV to MP3 (requires lame)

`which lame` –silent –preset standard /path/to/wavfile.wav /path/to/output.mp3

Convert from WAV to OggVorbis (requires libogg)

`which oggenc` -Q -o /path/to/output.ogg /path/to/wavfile.wav

Convert from AAC to MP3 (requires faad, lame)

create WAV file first:

`which faad` -q -o /path/to/output.wav /path/to/aacfile.m4a

create MP3 from WAV:

`which lame` –silent –preset standard /path/to/wavfile.wav /path/to/output.mp3

Convert from AAC to OggVorbis (requires faad, libogg)

create WAV file first:

`which faad` -q -o /path/to/output.wav /path/to/aacfile.m4a

create OggVorbis from WAV:

`which oggenc` -Q -o /path/to/output.ogg /path/to/wavfile.wav

Convert from OggVorbis to MP3 (requires libogg, lame)

create WAV file first:

`which oggdec` -Q -o /path/to/output.wav /path/to/oggfile.ogg

create MP3 from WAV:

`which lame` –silent –preset standard /path/to/wavfile.wav /path/to/output.mp3

Updating files in bulk

Remove spaces from all filenames in current directory:

for i in *; do mv “$i” `echo $i | sed ‘s/ //g’`; done

Convert all WAV files in current directory to MP3 files:

for i in *.wav; do `which lame` –preset standard “$i” “`echo $i | sed ‘s/(.*).wav/1.mp3/’`”; done

If you are interested in switching from FreeBSD to Linux, you will need to come up with a plan for migrating your user accounts to Linux. If your account info is already stored on an LDAP server you won’t have to do much but ensure that the path to your user’s bash shell is /bin/bash rather than /usr/local/bin/bash (if you have installed bash from FreeBSD’s ports system), but you may still want to migrate a few accounts to have around as a backup in case there are problems with accessing your LDAP server. If your accounts are not stored on LDAP, now actually might be a good time to look into doing this (although the details of doing so are obviously outside of the scope of this document), however you might find it easiest to import accounts to your LDAP server using the provided scripts for doing this, and using these scripts requires that you have local Linux based accounts, unless you can find a script that will work with FreeBSD/BSD based accounts. So, one way or another, learning how to migrate your local accounts is probably going to be useful to you. Here is how to do so…

Local accounts created by various services/packages you have installed

Keep in mind that you probably do not want to migrate the accounts created by packages such as Apache or MySQL, as it is probably easiest to allow the packages you use to install these services to do this for you since the UID/GIDs will be different and the names may mismatch what is supplied in the included config files. Ditto for special accounts that were created by the OS itself. With the following instructions, it will be assumed that you will skip migrating these accounts.

Reading /etc/master.passwd

In FreeBSD the account info and passwords reside in this file, whereas in Linux there are separate files for account info and passwords. There are probably a number of superior ways to do the following, this method is admittedly rather crude, but it will work in a pinch. Using awk you can read your /etc/master.passwd and come up with some commands you can use to help to generate both the /etc/passwd (for accounts) and /etc/shadow (for passwords) files.

For generating /etc/passwd:

awk -F: ‘$2 ~/^$/ {print “useradd ” $1 ” -d ” $9 ” -c “” $8 “” -s /bin/bash”}’ /etc/master.passwd

You will then need to copy and paste this output to your shell to create these accounts one-by-one.

For generating /etc/shadow:

awk -F: ‘$2 ~/^$/ {print $1″:”$2″:15282:0:99999:7:::”}’ /etc/master.passwd

This output can be pasted directly into your /etc/shadow file

Notes

• If you wish you can of course redirect output for both of these to a file (by appending “> /path/to/your/file” to the end of these commands)
• Again, be sure to weed out accounts that should not be migrated, be careful!

If there is a better way to do any of this, please comment below!

Those who have used Github know how nice it is to be able to “git push” your work to the cloud, how nice it is to have this repository function as a backup of your work, and how nice it is to be able to so easily “git pull” this project down to another machine. The following tutorial details how you can setup your own private Github repository, minus the web interface and all of the features that go along with this (e.g. comments, pull requests, etc.). This approach is great for when you might want to store some sensitive and/or proprietary information in your project (other than database passwords and content which can be easily added to your .gitignore file), and you don’t wish to purchase a private Github repository.

On your server:

1. Make a new directory where you want your project’s copy to live
2. In this directory run git init --bare. You’ll of course need Git installed on this machine

If your changes are already being tracked Git:

1. See what remote sources you have defined via git remote
2. If you have an origin defined, change it to the directory of your new repository you have created in the above steps by editing your .git/config file. If the repository resides on another machine accessible via SSH you can define the origin as ssh://[hostname]/path/to/repository
3. If the origin is not defined define it via git remote add origin [path or URL to repository]

If they aren’t:

In your main project directory do a:

1. git init
2. git add *
3. be sure to also git add your .htaccess or .gitignore files if you have them
4. git commit -am "initial commit of my project"  (your comment can obviously be whatever you like)
5. git remote add origin [path or URL to repository]

Push your project files to the server for the first time

git push -u origin master

You can then clone your server’s repository via a git clone to download this project to other machines. You can create a great workflow using the above instructions that will allow you to setup a testing environment, and publish changes to your live server via a simple git push command! This, along with using Ruby on Rail’s database migration tools makes for a powerful environment that will not only allow you to publish code changes to your live site, but also track database schema changes and apply them as well!

We are pleased to announce that the new website for virtuosic, world renown, former Canadian Brass trumpet alum Ron Romm is now live!

This site is one of the first sites released incorporating a new service that has not been formally announced, which entails building a NetMusician site using a premade design template, saving money in not having to go through the design and branding process – perfect for musicians or companies on a strict budget! These templates can be downloaded or purchased from a site such as wordpress.org or templatemonster.com where there are many quality templates or “themes” to choose from. The TemplateMonster site provides customers an option to purchase exclusive rights over the design, for those that do not wish to have any site potentially using the same theme, although this additional feature is completely optional.

This site is also one of the first NetMusician sites to feature our new mobile-friendly media player, as well as several revamped versions of our existing modules in preparation of our next major launch. Details on this will be made available in the coming weeks/months!

1. Double tap your home icon while on the home screen to bring up a list of all running apps
2. Press and hold on the Mail icon until a red minus appears, press that minus

This will quit that currently running app (whereas pressing the home icon normally simply switches GUI control to a new process – i.e. the app is left to run in the background). Once the app has been quit and relaunched these errors should go away.

I can’t substantiate this, this is just a theory, but I suspect that since the iOS Mail client (and OS X Mail) are not particularly good about limiting the number of connections to an IMAP server to sane and reasonable numbers that these errors are generated when no more connections are permitted, and will go away on their own after unused connections timeout. Quitting the app presumably kills these IMAP connections in IMAP IDLE state.