the echothis blog

I was trying to cut the fat out of a disk-challenged server recently and wanted to see what was taking up all the space. This link was a good start, but with some cleanup a more useful version of this command, exporting the output to a flat file readable in Excel, is: # find /var/www/… Continue reading Finding the space hogs on a Linux server

When ordering a new VPS box from my hosting provider, I was pleased to see they had upgraded to Plesk 9.5. However, I was disappointed to find out it wasn’t running automatically on https://MYIPADDRESS:8443/ (which obviously makes it impossible to log in and configure the first time). So I rolled up my sleeves, SSH’ed in… Continue reading Startup errors with Plesk 9.5 on CentOS 5

Using Cake, once you start working with a large number of data cache files, you see the limitation of storing them all in a single directory (which is the default FileEngine behavior). In my case I have a hierarchical Tree behavior on a model and rather than traverse the tree to find its path each… Continue reading A simpler NamespaceFile engine for CakePHP 1.2

Often if you have a long-loading page, you’ll want to stream the content as it arrives. Firefox does a great job of aggressively rendering content, but other browsers like Google Chrome and IE don’t. A typical workaround for this is to first “wake up” the browser, then periodically flush the output buffer – this has… Continue reading Google Chrome doesn’t like to stream

I run several websites on a leased VPS box and use WinSCP to SSH in. Suddenly a few days ago I got locked out, and got only “Connection Timeouts” when I tried to log in. First I figured this was due to my Norton Internet Security firewall suddenly getting confused. But disabling it, and the… Continue reading What to do if your ISP decides to block outgoing SSH requests