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!

cheap cialis onlineHaving 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 cheap cialis onlinework 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.

cheap cialis online 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.

If you aren’t running a XenServer instance, then I would suggest following the official guide yourself to prevent anything bad from happening (). My instance that I used for this installation was a fresh install of the Sarge image, so I won’t be going into any special circumstances that may need to be addressed by those who have installed a whole load of extras.

Let’s go!

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Go to and select a mirror. I happened to choose http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian as my mirror because I’m in the United States.

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deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

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rm /etc/apt/preferences
mount -o remount,rw /
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade
aptitude install initrd-tools
aptitude dist-upgrade
aptitude update


See? Not so hard. That is all I needed to do to upgrade my XenServer 3.2.0 Debian Sarge instance to Debian Etch. I am not saying these simplified steps will work for everyone, but for those few that have the same type of setup as we do, these instructions should simplify the upgrade process. Please comment with questions and/or suggestions… and if all else fails, use the official guide!

- Matt