Two very popular and widely used languages for building dynamic web sites are Perl and PHP. They make up two thirds of the "P" in the Linux Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack. How does their performance, using mod_perl and mod_php, compare for everyday web programming? I attempted to find out.

The MySQL database is unique in that it offers multiple storage engines. The SQL parser and front end interfaces are separate from the storage engines. This lets you choose the low level table format that suits your application best.

This article covers some basic steps and commands to encrypt your connection string and other items in a configuration file using ASP.NET 2.0. Microsoft has made it easier to have a portable key that encrypts certain sections in a web.config that are normally clear text. I have not found a quick how-to reference to allow for a scenario where the key is both on a local development machine along with being on a remote web server. Developers like to test out their code locally before publishing to production.

Moving all the accounts between two Servers that host the same control panel is usually not a very difficult process.

If you are like me on a shared hosting server chances are your web hosting account has cPanel or some other administration panel through which you can create/delete MySQL databases (DBs)/DB users. But you will not be able to:

Is your Apache Web server slowing down under the weight of streaming media content or database-driven applications? Lighttpd, sometimes pronounced "Lighty," is a lightweight HTTP server that can help alleviate Apache's load by serving static content or CGI scripts. Since Lighttpd uses fewer resources per request than Apache alone, it can generally serve most static content faster than Apache. It also benefits from an actively developed FastCGI interface that performs true load balancing, giving you all the performance benefits of compiled into Apache modules such as PHP.

This article is an introduction to the installation and deployment of Ruby on Rails.

Sometimes we may require to run multiple versions of MySQL on the same Server. This can happen if you either need to test a new MySQL release or you need a new MySQL version and you don't want to make any changes to the existing system.

The whole process of securing a Server or network is quite extensive. I'm discussing just one major aspect of Security here - Firewalls. Specifically my topic is about APF firewall.

For anyone that has been wishing to switch to Apache 2 on their Mac, this is the
time to do it. PHP 5 has also recently been updated to 5.1.2 and this tutorial
describes in detail, the best method to both build and install these programmes
on your Mac.

Since Apple don't include Apache 2 with OS X yet I have felt it better to keep
Apache 2 in its own directory, and to keep PHP for Apache 2, etc. confined the
that directory too.

One of the first things many people try with ASP.NET V2.0 (currently in Beta 2) and with the starter kits is to create a new user. Creating a new user will be common in ASP.NET version 2.0, whether it is the CreateUserWizard, a starter kit form or using the Membership namespace from code. Immediately following that is often a sigh of frustration when a fairly non-descriptive error occurs: "Please enter a different password." What is that supposed to mean? Is it recommending passwords for us now and not pleased with the one we chose? Did the passwords not match? Even carefully double checking and trying again with a password that is 7 characters and has numbers and upper case and lower case letters triggers this non-descriptive error.

These instructions assume a dual boot Windows and Fedora i386
to i686 system with an nVidia GeForce graphics card, an "always on" LAN or
broadband connection configured "DHCP", and at least 10 GB of free disk space
for the Fedora partition. For the most part the steps should be followed in the
order that they were written because certain programs must be installed and
certain configurations made in order to facilitate later steps.

This is a brief guide to configuring a system running SCO Unix & TCP/IP, Open
Desktop, or Open Server 5 to work with Xmission. You will need SCO ODT 3.0 or
above, or SCO Unix 3.2v4.2 with the most recent version of TCP/IP. The version
of TCP/IP included in ODT 2.0 will not work with Xmission's PPP and most other
ISP's. Use it at your own risk.

The Openwall Project provides security related kernel patches for Linux and BSD kernels. I read about this in Hardening Linux by James Turnbull. The patch that most interested me was to prevent executable code from running in the stack. That won't prevent all buffer overflow attacks, but it can stop some of them. I really don't understand why this isn't just the default nowadays - I know it can break some programs and debuggers, but it seems smart to me.

Sometimes we just have to move on. Your current mail server may just not be meeting your needs, so you've put up something new. But what about old mail? If your servers are identical (Sendmail to Sendmail, etc.) or use the same mailbox storage format, you may be able to just transfer files directly. If not, read on..