We all know backups are important. I’ve found what I consider a pretty good backup solution using Amazon S3. It’s super cheap, your backups are in a secure location, and you can get to them from anywhere. For my backup solution, I’m using Debian Linux (Etch), but this whole setup is not dependent on your current favorite flavor of Linux because it uses Java.

1. Signup for Amazon S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
2. Install the latest Java Runtime Environment: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
3. Download Jets3t: http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.html
4. Extract Jets3t installation to a location on your server.Example: /usr/local/jets3t/
5. Add your AWS account key and private key to the “synchronize” tool configuration file:Example: /usr/local/jets3t/configs/synchronize.properties
6. Use an S3 browser tool like Firefox S3 Organizer to add two buckets: one for file backups and one for MySQL backups.
7. Add a MySQL user whose primary function is dumping data. Let’s call it ‘dump’ with the password ‘dump’:
   [code lang="bash"]mysql>GRANT SELECT, LOCK TABLES ON exampleDB.* to 'dump' identified by 'dump';[/code]
8. Build your backup script (replace paths with your own) called s3backup.sh:
   [code lang="bash"]JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/j2re1.4.2_17
   export JAVA_HOME
   JETS3T_HOME=/usr/local/j3ts3t
   export JETS3T_HOME
   SYNC=/usr/local/jets3t/bin/synchronize.sh
   WWWROOT=/var/www/fakeuser/
   MYSQLBUCKET=example-bucket-mysql
   WWWBUCKET=example-bucket-www
   MYSQLDUMPDIR=/usr/local/mysql-dumps
   WWWDUMPDIR=/usr/local/www-dumps
   # Perform backup logic
   dayOfWeek = `date +%a`
   dumpSQL="backup-www-example-com-${dayOfWeek}.sql.gz"
   dumpWWW="backup-www-example-com-${dayOfWeek}.tar.gz"
   mysqldump -u dump -pdump exampleDB | gzip > "${MYSQLDUMPDIR}/${dumpSQL}"
   # Compress the website into an archive
   cd ${WWWROOT}
   tar -czf "${WWWDUMPDIR}/${dumpWWW}" .
   # Perform Jets3t synchronize with Amazon S3
   $SYNC --quiet --nodelete UP "${WWWBUCKET}" "${WWWDUMPDIR}/${dumpWWW}"
   rm -f "${WWWDUMPDIR}/${dumpWWW}"
   $SYNC --quiet --nodelete UP "${MYSQLBUCKET}" "${MYSQLDUMPDIR}/${dumpSQL}"
   rm -f "${MYSQLDUMPDIR}/${dumpSQL}"[/code]
9. Make sure your script has execute permission
10. Add a cron job to perform daily backups:
    [code lang="bash"]$>crontab -e
    0 0 * * * /root/s3backup.sh[/code]

That’s it. Good luck!

viagra online genericHaving written this blog post almost a full year ago, I have since then completely switched all of my Joomla websites to the automatically : Scale My Site. Since doing so, we haven’t had to deal with HAProxy, load balancing, or anything with regard to scaling due to the hosting cloud’s seamlessly clustered environment. I highly recommend anyone reading this article right now to check out to get load balancing/scaling for your Joomla website without breaking a sweat.

The load balancer is located at our own colo. I followed the tutorial on to set up two servers at our colo in an ActivePassive fashion using Heartbeat for redundancy.

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Since I’m using only two web servers and one needs to serve database requests, I decided to set weights in HAProxy so that the hybrid server receives half as many requests as the dedicated web server. Here is an example of what my haproxy.cfg file contains:

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global
    log 127.0.0.1 local0
    log 127.0.0.1 local1 notice
    maxconn 4096
    user haproxy
    group haproxy

defaults
    log global
    mode http
    option httplog
    option dontlognull
    retries 3
    redispatch
    maxconn 2000
    contimeout 5000
    clitimeout 50000
    srvtimeout 50000

listen webfarm 63.123.123.100:80
    mode http
    balance roundrobin
    cookie SERVERID insert nocache indirect
    option forwardfor
    option httpchk HEAD /check.txt HTTP/1.0

    # Stats
    stats enable
    stats auth admin:password

    # Web Node
    server SBNode1 63.123.123.101:80 cookie Server1 weight 20 check
    # Web + MySQL Node
    server SBNode2 63.123.123.102:80 cookie Server2 weight 10 check

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Many people understand that it’s a super big pain to work with the administrator control panel in a Joomla clustered environment. First of all, you’ll keep getting kicked out every few page requests, even while using sticky/persistent load balancing. Second, working with backend WYSIWYG rich-text editors is nearly impossible. I figured out how to do it, and here’s what I did.

1. Decide upon the management node
2. Give the management node a public host entry in DNS (e.g. node1.yourdomain.com)
3. Open configuration.php for editing
4. Locate the “live site” variable ($mosConfig_live_site)
5. Replace with “http://” . $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
6. Save

Using the current host as the live site allows you to use node1.yourdomain.com as an access point for the control panel. You viagra online genericwork in the control panel without doing this, but you will run into tons of problems with rich-text editors and custom components that request the live site URL in their underlying code.

viagra online generic Recently, I implemented a load balancing solution using HAProxy that used the ACL system to send all traffic with /administrator/ in the URL to one “master” node, and it provided a way around the Joomla configuration change mentioned above. Check out this for more info.

…or so we thought.

We moved our most important project of the day from it’s ol’ reliable hosting to the Dreamhost hosting (because that’s where we had been developing the new website). The new site looked amazing, and up to that point all testing had returned positive results.

The evening of the first day after moving to Dreamhost, I get a call around 10 PM about the site being down. Investigating, I found out that our MySQL database was being hosed. I open a ticket with the company (the only way to contact them), expressing the urgency of the issue, and asked that a tech investigate what was happening to our database.

A short time later, with no word from support, our database clears up. Sweet! We’re back in business. In about 6 hours, we receive a response from a Dreamhost tech, and he mentions that they don’t see the issue, but offered a helpful suggestion with a few MySQL commands: show processlist -and- kill <processid>. I think to myself, “Cool! If this happens again, I’ll have the tools to fix it.” With this strange event behind us, I put faith in them again. I even convinced the CEO that we have the tools to fix the problem if it happens again, which was entirely true, and that we didn’t need to look elsewhere for another hosting company.

Big mistake.

Two days later, we receive a support message from a different tech – a complete polar opposite of the last guy that helped us out. Here is what he said:

Hello,

I was investigating the high load on your MySQL server when I discovered
that your sql user was running the following query more than 100
times on the website database (here’s the beginning of that command):

select u.id, u.name, c.avatar, c.showOnline from jos_users u,jos_fb_users
c where u.id = c.userid AN

In consideration of the other customers using that server I have disabled
SELECT privileges for your database user. This has dropped the load on
your MySQL server from 180 down to around 15. Please optimize
your sites to run those queries much less frequently. Let me know if you
have any questions.

Thanks!
Craig

Awesome! I had been up until 3 AM that morning working on non-related stuff at home, and this guy decides to throw this at us at 6:45 AM on Saturday morning. The calls/emails start swarming in, and I’m up trying to figure out why the hell the site went down again. Disable SELECT permission on our main SQL user? Are you kidding?

Being the obstinate users that we are who like to be able to read data from their database, we re-enable SELECT permission for our main user. At the same time, I activated the built-in Joomla caching feature, bringing the load down to a minimum. Then I also removed code with the Joomla core that prevents browser-side caching, further improving the performance of our website. Take that! The website moves faster than ever!

Exactly one day later, we receive yet another message from our friendly neighborhood Dreamhost technicians saying that they have renamed our index.php file to index.php.Disabled_by_Dreamhost, citing too many connections on that specific file (Joomla is run off the main index.php file — go figure), and then “suggested” that we should look into Dreamhost Private Server. The kicker is that we already contacted them about DreamhostPS earlier, but were rejected because it’s invite only, and was still in the development phase. Whatever.

So the day this happened was a Monday, and I was supposed to have a day off because of overnight maintenance that needed to be done Monday evening/Tuesday morning. So I get the call that Dreamhost did this at around 9 AM, and so at that point we decide the screw Dreamhost and move. We move it back to a server in-house while we acquire a dedicated server elsewhere, and I spent most of my day off moving the website once more.

Happily, we now have a super fast dedicated server far away from the mingling hands of the Dreamhost techs.

With all this being said, I wanted to make some public apologies:
- I apologize to Dreamhost for putting a website on your servers that needed to use one of our unlimited number of databases.
- I apologize to Dreamhost for renaming index.php.Disabled_by_Dreamhost to index.php because our website was down.
- I apologize to Dreamhost for using an instance of Joomla byway of their built-in ONE CLICK INSTALL.
- I apologize to my company for ever considering using them for a website that has any interest in being nothing more than a stick in the mud.

I will admit that we had a lot of users, and that Joomla isn’t the most efficient engine out there, but the way Dreamhost handled the situation was very unprofessional, and we’ll be closing our account with them soon.

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of websites that don’t get any traffic, but need a place for all your domains, DH isn’t bad. I have my own account with them, and so far the 2 or 3 people that visit those websites on my account, haven’t had to deal with any down time. I’ll just have to make sure to move before any of them become popular…