Tormenting one engineer at a time.
Posts tagged lessons
Cloudflare and this website?
11 year ago
If you scroll to the very bottom of this page, or any page for that matter, you’ll see a new icon in my footer. It mentions Cloudflare. This should go under the lessons of server management, particularly website management.
Often you may run into a problem where you might get “Dugg” or “Slashdotted”. Well, maybe not that often, but if you have a small home server like mine, it wont handle that kind of traffic if it does happen. That’s a crucial point as a webmaster. Your stuff is being read, and that’s a great feeling for anyone on the internet.
Cloudflare steps in where you might fail. Cloudflare is going to cache everything on your website and if your site goes down, it will serve it for you. No additional software installation and more importantly, no hardware. All I had to do to set it up was modify where my DNS was pointing. The only downfall to this method is subdomain folks wont be able to take advantage. Sorry “mybestwebsite.hopto.org” or whoever. You have to own your own domain from GoDaddy or 1&1, or my most favorable these days, Domain.com.
If the event does happen, here’s what the theory tells me. My server goes down. Cloudflare will recognize that and serve cached copies of my pages, seeing as its receiving all the traffic first. At that point, the server comes back online, and Cloudflare works with my server to get everything updated and good to go.
Let’s talk setup, what did it REALLY take to get it set up completely? Step 1. I signed up for a Cloudflare account. Easy and free. Step 2. I told it I wanted it to protect dethlefsmoreno.com. Step 3. It copied my existing DNS records into its system. Step 4. I went to my registrar and changed my DNS to point to the Cloudflare DNS (provided at the appropriate time by Cloudflare). Step 5. Wait about an hour (times will vary depending on your DNS provider, registrar, etc). I got an email when it detected the DNS change, and no interruption in service.
What else does it do? It’s also supposed to stop bad people from getting to my website. People like Viagra spammers, or so on. Also it implements my Google Analytics code into each page, regardless of what my website actually serves up. Also tracks, more accurately, my visitors. Because I’m having them control the DNS settings (but not the registration or the hosting), they have the ability to do a lot more than the simple stuff that plugins of WordPress, Joomla, SMF, etc attempt to do.
I suggest giving this a try. Mileage will vary, as this is a low traffic website (for now), so I’d be interested to hear how it helps (or hurts) your website.
Take a lesson from me – Server Admin Lessons
01 year ago
There are many things that you should know about me. None of these are things like I like long walks on the beach, as a matter of fact I hate walks pretty much anytime. I, however, do trust technology a bit too much. Maybe more than a bit!
As a friend of mine said, paraphrasing, “For a techie, you have more computer problems than anyone I know.” Why does he say this? Let’s recount my record of recent events. I had my server fill the hard drive it’s using… twice. I had issues with my server to the point where it was easer for me to reformat my hard drive and start over. I use a virtual server from my main computer (yes… cringe at it, I know). It’s current iteration is a VirtualBox server running Ubuntu 9.10 Server with ISPConfig 3. During that reformat of my hard drive, I also reformatted my host computer back to default of Windows 7, which caused something to happen with the virtual hard drive, causing it not to boot anymore. Now I had to find a way to get at data stored on a Ext4 partition on a virtual hard drive that wouldn’t mount with that then version VMWare Server / Disk Mount Utilities! Not to mention, I forgot setting LVM on it, which caused about 4 days to be lost. Finally getting at that, I was able to recover one of the critical parts of the HDD, the latest backup for a site I host, Kristas Kakery. Now all that is done, I realize that this iteration of my server has been down for one of the previously mentioned reasons (full HDD) for a matter of days, and no one bothered to tell me! Not to mention that I have done live upgrades to items that have messed up the server, because I’m simply too lazy to spend the resources to copy over the virtual HDD, run it in a virtual server as well, and test changes first.
With all that covered, here’s a list of things not to do. Learn from me.
1. Don’t use a virtual server software on your main computer.
2. Set up some monitoring service to alert you when your site/server goes down. The linked one is free for one website.
3. ALWAYS have a development machine to test upgrades before making said upgrades/changes live.
I’m sure I’m missing a few, but it’s currently 1:15 in the morning, and I’m tired. I’m sure this isn’t the only part in the series of lessons I hope to relay to you, so you don’t make the same mistakes I do.