I accidently deleted my Pictures personal folder on my Vista laptop earlier and was stuck trying to recreate it. If I created a new folder and called it Pictures then it would turn in to a file, if I copied an existing folder and then renamed it to Pictures it, once again, would turn in to a file.

The trick to restoring it was to run the following command via the Run prompt in the Start Menu:

The php/java bridge it a pretty awesome little protocol that basically lets us use java classes inside our own PHP applications! This lets you harness the awesome power of all the Java libraries that exist, including the popular Lucene search engine library.

I referenced two excellent blog entries here and here whilst implementing Lucene search for this blog, but I am writing up the experience anyway to compare issues and difficulties and enhance my understanding of the process.

One of the quickest ways (faster than scp at any rate) of copying a large number of files between 2 servers is by abusing the awesome powers of Linux’s pipeing and netcat and tar!

Basically we set up netcat listening on the server you want the files copied too which pipes it’s output to tar which extracts anything sent to it.

<br /> root@tanglefoot:/exports/archive# nc -l -p 7878 | tar -xzf -<br />

We handle DNS for thousands of domains for our customers and whilst our existing solution worked it was very messy to maintain and work with so we decided to trial a new solution for our offices to see how it would perform. We wanted something that could be database driven for ease of maintenance and we were personally recommended PowerDNS, so we decided to trial that one first.

For the database we would normally go with MySQL but we wanted an instance of PostgreSQL to play with as we are considering moving our main platform to it at some point in the future.

mod_jk is a conduit between a web server and Tomcat, it supports a variety of web servers including IIS. Using mod_jk to put Apache in front of Tomcat lets you use all the power of Apache (caching, gzip, mod_rewrite, etc) whilst at the same time serving content from Tomcat, also with Ubuntu it’s really easy to set up!

First of all install the software, you will need to enable the backports repository on Dapper for this.

The Linux Virtual Server is a highly scalable and highly available server built on a cluster of real servers, with the load balancer running on the Linux operating system. The architecture of the server cluster is fully transparent to end users, and the users interact as if it were a single high-performance virtual server.

We use LVS extensively at work to provide a scalable and highly available website which gets around 300 hits per second. Setting up and managing LVS can be made a lot easier using a tool that our ex staff wrote called LVSadmin. Written in perl it is easily configurable and provides a curses based front end to manage the servers. Setting up a new LVS cluster is really easy.