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Comment by atambo | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to see linode's library finally catch up to slicehost's articles. For a while it was really bare but now I prefer it over slicehost as slicehost articles is starting to become cluttered with all the old distro specific categories. One thing that is still missing from linode's library is nginx.

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One thing that I have noticed about slicehosts articles is that they really just cater to two markets, the rails market and the php market and what they do is lump rails/nginx together and php/apache together.

While this is generally okay they really don't need 7 different articles on how to configure Ubuntu 8.04 9.04 9.10 and Debian to do the same thing, linode at least dumps ubuntu and debian together.

What I wanted to see was a current comprehensive guide on going beyond the single server setup and things like nginx + PHP using PHP-FPM.

I also wanted to see guides for HAProxy, stunnel, NFS and anything to help make iptables easier.

It's not that I can't forge on and and figure it all out, it's that I want to be able to quickly repeat what I do and to spend less time on server admin and more time on application development.

As I've moved to Linode only this week (their London datacenter finally convinced me) I've now written stubs of those articles that I felt were missing, so if anyone wants a high availability, load-balanced and SSL capable solution with a shared static file backend then these might put you on the path I'm walking: http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/07/nfs-static-ports/ http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/07/installing-haproxy-load... http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/08/installing-configserver...

I also found this incredibly useful... make HAProxy your virtual hosting manager (I serve 10 sites off of 4 web servers and each site is just identified by a different port number on the backend web servers): http://www.techrawr.com/tag/virtual-hosts/

And this one on MySql replication is pretty comprehensive: http://aciddrop.com/2008/01/10/step-by-step-how-to-setup-mys...

Failover IP config is a bit thin on the ground too... I used this guide: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/UbuntuHighAvailabilityTeam/Pacemak...

I agree we need easier-to-use documentation on this stuff, but have you considered documenting what you've done yourself? I started keeping a notebook of helpful tricks back in the 90s. By the mid-90s I was publishing some of the info, and by the late 90s I had friends working with me to create articles. This was when the e-Zine was still pseudo-popular as a channel of self-publishing. We later went on to blog format, but the results are the same:

Your brain forgets little, but loses references to information it hasn't needed to use in a while. Documenting things (which includes proofreading and maybe even testing your documentation), uses repetition to solidify those references. Some people learn by repetition better than others, but even if it's just penciling apache config tips or iptables examples into a Moleskine journal, writing is often one of the best ways to memorize things.

The things I've written down are the things I remember best or at least they're the things I find easiest to come back to. It goes for the awk recipes I've jotted down, database tuning parameters, and even automotive repair tips.

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