Increasing MaxClients

I noticed that in times of increased activity, my servers weren't responding. Having a look at the logs revealed "server reached MaxClients setting", so I was just stilling in a queue until somebody dropped off the server. Not a great position to be in when your client is shouting down the phone!

So, a quick trip to apache.conf which lives in /etc/apache2 on debian3.1 and a change to the settings.

I've created the following settings for the conf file: each section is part of the IfModule preforc declaration. A quick restart of apache and all is well.

prefork.c:

StartServers 8
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 20
MaxClients 256
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000

worker.c:

StartServers 2
MaxClients 256
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

perchild.c:

NumServers 5
StartThreads 5
MinSpareThreads 5
MaxSpareThreads 10
MaxThreadsPerChild 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

Using subdomains for plesk login

There is an interesting how-to here for using subdomain login for plesk admin sessions. Normally, you need to login at https://yourdomain:8443 - and lets face it, I kept forgetting the port number when I started using Plesk.

http://alexle.net/archives/152

Automatix2

I have just found Automatix2. It is basically an auto-installer for all those pesky programs that don't come with a simple apt-get install. It has a graphical interface not unlike Synaptic, but needs some terminal work to get it installed.

echo "deb http://www.getautomatix.com/apt feisty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we need to add the key:

wget http://www.getautomatix.com/keys/automatix2.key
gpg --import automatix2.key
gpg --export --armor E23C5FC3 | sudo apt-key add -

Then all you need to do is update the packages db and install it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install automatix2

It appears under:
Applications -> System Tools -> Automatix

It helpfully installs things like:

• Google Earth
• Skype
• Picassa
• RealPlayer
• Fonts
• Opera
• JRE
• Multimedia codecs

and the latest versions of many others.

Plesk and Debian disaster

I was doing some server maintenance on one of my servers which houses a Plesk install. The base is Debian and a simple apt-get upgrade, as employed on plenty of previous occasions, updated the packages that needed updating.

Unfortunately, the sources.list for apt were configured to get the latest stable version and Debian 3.1 has recently moved to Debian 4 (etch). Unfortunately, as I have since found, Plesk 8.1 doesn't like etch and despite my best attempts to roll back the changes, all was in vain.

Better still, the admin functions that allow migration of accounts didn't work. So, I was left delving into the mysql psa database to regenerate the installation on another machine before migrating the /var/www/vhosts and /var/qmail/mailnames directories. That of course meant hand creating all clients, domains, email, forwards, aliases, subdomains.......... the list seems endless.

All my servers have now have their sources.list changed to getting 3.1 updates only. I'll not do that again.