Ubuntu has now days awesome start/stop system called Upstart which has replaced /sbin/init. It is also capable to supervising processes. It is really simple to add new processes to upstart. I wanted my blog start automatically on system boot and therefore I added my blog under upstarts control.

I had problems with mail delivery on one server where server self doesn’t have any email services. The case was following: server’s hostname was example.com and emails for example.com was handled by another server. By default sendmail will treat all emails sent to example.com meant for local users eg. user@example.com will be searched from local user table.

I wanted all emails to example.com to be delivered to domains email server which was defined on MX record. I’m not sendmail expert and for my own servers I prefer postfix, but this was client’s server so I had to figure out how to configure sendmail handle this case.

I have read nice posts of Gunicorn and decided to try it out. Until now I this blog was running top of Flup and from very beginning I had some bad feelings about it. This Django based blog is running on small VPS and that’s why I’m really interested of low memory footprint. I read that Gunicorn has small memory footprint and high performance so I installed it on my VPS. Setting up Gunicorn was really easy and straightforward process which took only few minutes and released almost 40 Mb memory. I will explain the installation and configuration process shortly.

Yesterday I faced with really weird issue with PHP’s session handling. At work we are hosting dozens of sites on our servers and suddenly on one server we were getting lot of weird out of space errors when PHP tried to open session files. Error message was “Warning Unknown: open(/path/to/sessions/sess_somehash, O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28)” . Because of those errors I was believing we were somehow running out of space on apache’s temp file partition. Truth was there was only few megabytes data, but the problem was that we had over 200 000 files on one folder and PHP got crazy of that.

As I have mentioned I use now days Mercurial for my pet projects. There was one thing I was missing from Git. Git has nice feature to pick part of files for commit. Its really nice feature because I find myself regularly doing many small issues between commits which I want to commit separately.

Same kind of feature have been available for Mercurial over two years from now. It is called hg record which is made available by record extension. This increased Mercurials usability at lot. I hope this tip will help someone else who has also wondered if this kind of functionality exists in Mercurial.

Should we still consider to move on Mercurial at our work :-/