NoSQL fun… 5 minutes Q&A session covering NoSQL and relational databases; very funny. Check it out:

“Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.”

Everyone uses Google Analytics (GA), right? It’s a great product and even better it’s free. It is a win/win situation where there is no point in anyone running their own analytics unless they have something custom and specific that is not covered by GA.

Still as other google product its documentation is, let’s say not the best. A while ago I started working on a project and there was no web analytics in place. I asked them why is that? They said they have too big traffic to be accepted in GA. Hmm… I looked into it and I must admit I could not find much information that we were interested. Finally looked over the terms of services and there I found:
“2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.”

So there is a limit, a tiny one I would say of 5mil pageviews per month (per account, not even per site). Our site was making about 45Mil pageviews at that time. Per day! So what if we wanted to use GA? We searched everywhere but could not find any commercial offering of GA or any other information. We asked the @googleanalytics on twitter but we were completely ignored.

What to do? Well, we just gave it a try and added the site and started tracking it in GA as any other site. Surprisingly, it worked just fine for a few months. Yesterday though, we received an email from the google analytics team (or should I say GA “robot”?) telling us that they have detected we have a high traffic, much higher than the allowed limit of 5mil pageviews per month, and from now on we are no longer going to have live reports but only daily updated reports. This is a limitation we can live with, but it would have been great if they would have given us some option to pay for some extra services. My client would have been happy to pay in the first place, but I assume this is something google doesn’t care at all and they just want to offer it as a free services. There is a great opportunity for such a product that could handle high traffic analytics and can do real-time and other goodies; we would be definitely interested. In the meantime if you have a site that makes more than 5mil pageviews per month (not so uncommon) you can definitely use GA; in the worst case they will restrict your updates to keep up with your traffic. For our site we tracked 1,608,074,379 Pageviews last month in GA  and it works just fine.

Today I’ve finally moved the emails for my domain ducea.com to google apps for domains. I’m probably one of the few people that still had their own email server these days, and I’m sure anyone would question why would I want to run that on my own server. And the answer to that is that I didn’t, but thought this migration would be more complicated and time consuming so I always put it in the back on my todo list. I wanted to do it for a long time, but never got to it.

Seems like lately I’ve moved everyone I could onto google apps; friends, clients, or even strangers I could easily convince them on how great it is to not worry about your email server and put this into the hands of someone like google; and all this for free. Then why did it take so long for me to move? Well, email is very important to my business and this is why a long time ago (too many years to remember) I’ve made the decision to serve it on my own dedicated server, instead of a cheap vps. This was the main reason I rented the server in a good hosting facility (started with ThePlanet and then moved to SoftLayer about 3 years ago) and was happy to pay for it to know that I have a reliable service and my email will be reliable also, and be sure that if I get an email from a client or some nagios alert that something is not working I will be getting it immediately as expected. I’ve been a big fan of imap and used that all the time so I can check in the emails from different locations and have a central place where the files are and can be easily backed up. As any sysadmin I ended up with a big .procmailrc file with many rules, where some of them are most certainly no longer needed (projects completed, etc.) and with a huge Maildir, as I like to save anything that might be useful in the future. Don’t get me wrong I hit delete probably 80% of the time, but over time this grew to something like 1.2G quite easy. I’m sure many people have much bigger mailboxes than this, but anyway…

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As Matt Simmons announced on his blog, I’ll be one of the members of the LISA2010 blogging team. I’m really excited to be part of such a great team with Matt, Matthew and Ben, and looking forward for a great event. We will be blogging and sharing things we find interesting at LISA on the USENIX blog, that you should definitely bookmark it in case you don’t have it already. If you will be at LISA2010 definitely come say hi; I’d love to meetup and chat.

Matt’s full announcement on the USENIX blog: Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team

Last week I attended FreelanceCamp Pro in San Francisco, hosted by the offices of the newly open coworking facility of the main sponsor and organizer NextSpace. This event is based on a model of a BarCamp for freelancers and independent contractors.

If you don’t know what a barcamp is, this is a an “international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The day consists of sessions proposed by attendees and the schedule is created on site the morning of the event. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

This was my first barcamp, or unconference type of event I’ve attended and I must say it has been by far the most interesting conference I’ve ever participated. So much better, engaging and with great conversation than a the usual conference where someone on the stage presents his slides. I’ve learned many things and this post is to outline my takeaways from this event. Here are just the most important ones: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a very long time since I’ve updated my blog, and many things have happened during this time. As most of my friends and readers know by now, we moved to the States last year in December (about 5months ago), and this has been an amazing time for us with many changes in our lives. I could describe it as a full reload, complete reset, start from scratch, and so on. But it has been a great experience so far and we enjoy it and definitely have no regrets. We now live in beautiful California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Cupertino.

I’ve been lucky to have my brother (that is living in the States for many years now), help me out initially, and after that had great support from my US friends that perviously I knew only from Skype calls and emails. It was amazing to meet up with people I knew for many years but only ‘virtually’, and they have all been great and I am really thankful for all their support. It has been very hard to leave back home our family and friends, but again Skype to the rescue, and now we use it in the different direction (taking with people back home), and it has been an invaluable tool during this time.

I’m really excited to live in a place where most of the interesting ‘things’ in the tech field are happening, and I’ve already started getting involved in several meetups and conferences, and I expect that with time this will only become more and more interesting. Exciting times are coming in our field, and sysadmins/devops/webops will see a dramatic shift in their work in the future, as we move into cloud computing and automation.

I’m also very happy that I can now interact directly with my clients, going to their offices and having meetups in person is definitely a much better experience. I’ve been working for a long time remotely and this has definitely its advantages and I still work for much of my time remotely even now, but being able to speak and meet with people is definitely a much better experience for any consultant. I’ve also been very lucky to work on very interesting and challenging projects, and with the very best and smartest engineers in the industry, and this makes it even better.

Now that things are starting to cool off a little, I hope to be able to return to my blog and have the time to write about some of the exiting things I’ve had the chance to work on lately, like configuration management and automation with chef and bcfg2, scaling high traffic sites, cloud computing using amazon ec2/s3 and eucalyptus, but also about normal stuff that happen during the day of a sysadmin.

I’ve just finished reading “Learning Nagios 3.0″ by Wojciech Kocjan and published by Packt Publishing, and this is a great book for anyone interested in nagios. This is a beginner level book that introduces nagios to new users interested in monitoring their infrastructure, but it will also present advanced features that even more experienced sysadmins can benefit from. All these in a pretty compact book, at 301 pages.

The topics are as follows:

• Introduction
• Installation and Configuration
• Using the Nagios Web Interface
• Overview of Nagios Plugins
• Advanced Configuration
• Notifications and Events
• Passive Checks and NSCA
• Monitoring Remote Hosts
• SNMP
• Advanced Monitoring
• Extending Nagios

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This post is sponsored by FindMyHosting – a free and very comprehensive web hosting directory featuring the most popular web hosting companies and thousands of customer reviews.

I’ve been asked to review this site and give my impressions about it. The truth is that I don’t have much experience with shared hosting as most of my experience is with dedicated servers from various hosting companies, and anytime I had a friend asking about where do I recommend him to host his small site I didn’t knew where to direct him. This is why I thought that such a webhosting directory as FindMyHosting would be a great start for anyone looking for a shared hosting account to host his new site. We can search from a long list of hosting company and get them ranked by users reports (nice). Read the rest of this entry »

My post “Debian Lenny PXE Installation on Dell PowerEdge 1950/2950 servers: bnx2 annoyances” got some attention and several people used the resulted initrd images. My intention with that post was to show anyone how they can easily build their own updated initrd and use it to successfully install Dell PE 1950/2950 (or other systems that have bnx2 based nic’s). Apparently several people used the images I’ve made available for download and when lenny was updated to 5.0.1 the images stopped working because of the kernel upgrade in the installer. Several people send me notices that this is no longer working and I promptly build updated images for i386 and amd64. I would like to thank to all the people to contact me about this and specially to Alexander Grümmer that showed me that my previous post was not clear enough with the commands needed to rebuild your own initrd. This post will show a full copy and paste type of commands for doing this. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I started using twitter more and more. It took me a while to understand its usage, but today I think of twitter as a very useful tool to quickly communicate and receive news. Instead of blogging about some news I find it much easier (and faster) to tweet them. For example:

• Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r8 eighth update: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090408 #debian #etch #
• Results for #Debian Project Leader 2009 Election: Steve McIntyre was reelected for another year! http://is.gd/s2xV #

could have been the subjects of a new blog post, but now twitter feels much more natural to share such news, that don’t really need a blog post.

Moving forward, I thought that bringing this information from twitter to my blog in a weekly digest blog post would be something cool, and users of my blog not using twitter could find interesting. I setup the wordpress plugin called “Twitter Tools” to do just that. Yesterday the twitter digest post was published and I was looking at it and it was not looking so good; it was just a list of thoughts that were not related, and were either outdated or taken out of some discussion had in real-time on twitter; it was useless…

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