Server refresh (this time for real)

Submitted by Mark on November 23, 2006 - 11:42am.

Okay, this time I've migrated completely to Ubuntu Server 6.06. (And it is much better.) The G4 was going crazy with MySQL hogging 100% CPU randomly and data corruption flying all over the place....even just a few days after being reinstalled. Luckily, everything is migrated over to the new box and I can redo the G4 as a pure AFP/SMB fileserver.

I think it's safe to say that that a 1GHz Pentium III beats out a 533MHz G4...maybe not for video rendering, but certainly for MySQL and Apache.

I have to say, the install for Ubuntu Server was relatively painless. I chose the LAMP installation, then later installed the SSH, FTP, PPTP and Samba servers along with Webmin to administer them all. Then I copied over the databases from the old machine. (I was rather shocked to find that the watchdog database had filled to 955MB of log entries accumulated over several months. That was TRUNCATE'd on the spot.) And, yes, oddly enough, I can PPTP from my Mac now instead of having to use XP in Parallels after moving from OS X Server to Ubuntu. Go figure.

Anyway, yeah, I'm really liking the new setup.

PowerPC G4 533MHz >>>> Pentium III 1GHz
Mac OS X 10.4 Server >>> Ubuntu 6.06 Server
Apache 1.4 >>>>>>>>>> Apache 2.0.55
MySQL 4 + PHP 4 >>>>>> MySQL 5 + PHP 5

As before, please let me know in the comments if you find this is much faster.
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6.7s, pretty good

Submitted by Jeff on November 23, 2006 - 8:50pm.

6.7s, pretty good improvement !!

Definitely better

Submitted by linuxpenguin on November 23, 2006 - 9:59pm.

I don't know actual times but it sure loaded a lot faster.

I like Ubuntu Server, that's what I'm using for my website. It's nice and easy to setup and maintain.

I guess now you'll have to update your "About the server" page :)

better

Submitted by Chris on November 28, 2006 - 5:32pm.

Yeah, it's a lot faster. MUCH better. Good work.

What the hell is this "math problem" I have to do before making a comment?

spam

Submitted by linuxpenguin on November 30, 2006 - 10:02pm.

it's for spam protection, it helps keep spambots from spamming the site.

Of course they could easily be programmed to solve simple math problems, but probably most spambots don't do this since most sites don't use math problems as spam protection.

Exactly. And it's been

Submitted by Mark on November 30, 2006 - 10:54pm.

Exactly. And it's been working great so far. You wouldn't believe how advanced some of the bots are though. I've had about 20 spam accounts created over at the forums...and I have an image verification engine in place there. Either the bots can read that, or "data entry specialists" in China are getting paid a dollar an hour to read and type them in.

But yeah, it was getting uncontrollable...there were like 7000 spam comments. I killed them pretty easily using some MySQL queries like: DELETE FROM `comments` WHERE `comments`.`title` = "Viagra!";

I also installed a plugin called Bad Behavior that watches for goofy HTTP requests typical of spambots and instead of replying with the actual website, sends them a text-only page educating them about what a real HTTP request looking like. Helps keep the loser bots away and saves on bandwidth too.