March 2015 - Sysadmins of the North

PHP 5.6 default_charset change may break HTML output

An important note for everyone who's upgrading from PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 to PHP 5.6: the PHP default_charset in php.ini changed from "empty" to UTF-8, often breaking sites after upgradiong from PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 to PHP 5.6. UTF-8 encoding breaks when upgrading PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

By Jan Reilink 31/03/2015Web applications

GNU Linux

Turn off swap

Swapping is costly for disk I/O and not every Linux server needs to have a swap partition and to start swapping. For instance, MySQL servers all have more than enough RAM available to do their work. Yet, when a swap partition is enabled Linux starts swapping, and that degrades MySQL database performance.

By Jan Reilink 25/03/2015GNU Linux

GNU Linux Windows Server

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache.

By Jan Reilink 13/03/2015GNU Linux, Windows Server

Windows Server

Software deployment through WDS

In my environment, I had to set up a new Windows Deployment Services (WDS) configuration for Windows 8.1 Enterprise. To roll out in our office (some 20+ workstations). I wanted to install some additional software at the same time, without using Microsoft Deployment Workbench (using FirstLogonCommands), because I find the interface too slow. The solution? Read on...

By Jan Reilink 04/03/2015Windows Server

Month: March 2015

PHP 5.6 default_charset change may break HTML output

Turn off swap

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Software deployment through WDS

Windows Server

Web applications

PowerShell