During my time here at Ning I have had the opportunity to work on many different projects open and closed source. The one thing that has been a continuous trend is our ability to provide stable and useful open source code. Complimented by the likes of Thomas Dudziak, Brian McCallister, and Gerir Ning has proven to be able to remain on the cutting edge of technology without losing customer focus. Once again Ning is continuing this trend by releasing Theia as our most recent Open Source project. Theia provides a free alternative for monitoring NetApp utilization including CPU load, Disk usage, iops,...

Alright, so as we all know IPv4 is reaching the point of exhaustion and its time to start getting ready for IPv6. This can be very important for those of us who host web servers as many hosting providers will also be switching to assigning IPv6 addresses or NAT based Private IP’s in the Class A space 10.0.0.0/8 for IPv4 or fc00::/7 for IPv6 (Unique Local Address “ULA”). With that in mind how are you going to host your website on IPv6 address space? There are many web servers available as free Open Source software such as nginx, apache (httpd), and lighthttpd. For the context of this...

As many of you know I have decided to shift gears and accept a position with Silicon Valley startup Ning. With this transition I am migrating all  of my websites back over to linode. As a previous customer of linode I know that their service is reliable and they provide all of the features that an experienced I.T. professional is looking for including IPv6. Over the next few day’s I will be updating my servers to have IPv6 compatibility and networking which will give me the ability to host this blog in IPv4 as well as IPv6 address space. Following these updates I will document some of the...

What you need to know: 1. Familiar with linux text editors 2. Have a basic understanding of load balancing 3. Familiarity with Apache, MySQL, and rsync 4. The ability to create at least 4 virtual machines What does this set-up provide? This set-up will provide you with some very basic failover at the web servers by using a load balancer. Keep in mind I will not be discussing HA at the load balancer level so you will still have a single point of failure with this guide, as it is only intended to provide some fundamental knowledge on how to set-up a replicated and load balanced pair of web...