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10 May
Author’s Note: While most of this piece discusses configuration options for any operating system Apache supports, some of the content will be Unix/Linux (*nix) specific, which now includes Macintosh OS X and its underlying Unix kernel.
One of the many pieces of the Website puzzle is Web logs. Traffic analysis is central to most Websites, and the key to getting the most out of your traffic analysis revolves around how you configure your Web logs. Apache is one of the most — if not the most — powerful open source solutions for Website operations. You will find that Apache’s Web logging features are flexible for the single Website or for managing numerous domains requiring Web log analysis.
Tags: adding, age, apache, Apache - Apache, code, configure, count, disk, error, etc, executable, IDE, image, Linux, list, Module, monitoring, Open Source, Operations, option, Plugins, proc, process, RAM, scripts, SEF, server, Sites, Software, stable, traffic, visitors, World Wide Web25 Apr

SiSoftware has announced the availability of SiSoftware Sandra 2008, the latest version of its award-winning utility which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, PDAs1, Smart Phones1, small office/home office (SOHO) networks and enterprise networks.SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a 32 and 64-bit Windows system analyser that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, ODBC Connections, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.
Native ports for all major operating systems are available:
• Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista*, Longhorn* (x86)
• Windows x64 Edition XP/2003/Vista*/Longhorn* (AMD64/EM64T)
• Windows 64-bit Edition 2003/Longhorn* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 2003/2003SE (ARM CE 4.20)
• Windows Mobile 5 (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6 (ARM CE 5.02)
All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:
• SMP - Multi-Processor
• MC - Multi-Core
• SMT/HT - Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3 - Multi-Media instructions
• Wireless MMX - Mobile multi-media instructions
• NUMA - Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 - 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 - Intel* Itanium 64-bit
Key features:
• 4 native architectures support (x86, x64/AMD64/EM64T, IA64/Itanium3, ARM).
• 3 native platforms support (Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE4).
• Additional platforms supported through Java RE (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Solaris5).
• Additional platforms supported through .NET CLR (e.g. Mono/Linux5).
• 19 established benchmarking modules, 4 new to this version.
• 38 detailed information modules, 4 new to this version.
• Huge official hardware support through technology partners (Intel, AMD/ATI, SiS, VIA)
• Future instructions set support (Intel SSE46, AMD SSE4A6) on x86 and x64/AMD64/EM64T platforms.
• 6 charting options: combined, detailed, differences, components, performance vs. speed charts.
• 5 language versions (English, German, French, Italian, Russian) in a single installer.
• Enhanced Sandra Lite version (free for personal/educational use)
Notes:
1 .NET (Compact) Framework 2.0 and later supported.
2 Sun Java SE 6 (1.6.x) and later supported.
3 By special arrangement.
4 By special arrangement; device SDK required.
5 By special arrangement; Applet version only.
6 Unreleased, next-generation pre-release platforms at publication time.
New in SiSoftware Sandra XII (2008):
London, UK, August 15th 2007 - We are pleased to launch SiSoftware Sandra XII (2008), the latest version of our award-winning utility, which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, PDAs, smart-phones and networks.
Over time, there has been a continued and sustained growth in software portability and the development of software that can ultimately be executed on multiple platforms without recompilation. With the use of the software virtual machine (SVM) growing, be that .NET1 or Java2, the importance of offering a benchmark that measures their performance has grown.
The introduction of these benchmarks will soon allow the complete suite to be available on other operating systems - not just on Microsoft Windows, as we expanded into non-x86 architectures (IA64/Itanium3, x64/AMD64/EM64T, ARM) in the previous years. We have also added additional support for Virtual Machine and Runtime Engines to open up this information now to the our users.
Not everything in this release is virtual: as with all releases there is something very real in adding more and more support and trying to predict the new needs of our users as we achieved with each release. Support for digital certificates and cryptography, detailed information of the security settings, policies, users and groups of your computer, wireless networks and advanced charting.
This version adds the following new modules and functionality:
• .NET Benchmarking1
° .NET Arithmetic: Shows how well the system handles .NET arithmetic operations through the .NET CLR in comparison to other typical .NET CLRs.
° .NET Multi-Media: Shows how well the system handles .NET multi-media operations through the .NET CLR in comparison to other typical .NET CLRs.
• Java Benchmarking2
° Java Arithmetic: Shows how well the system handles Java arithmetic operations through the Java Runtime Engine (JRE) in comparison to other typical Java Virtual Machines.
° Java Multi-Media: Shows how well the system handles Java multi-media operations through the Java Runtime Engine (JRE) in comparison to other typical Java Virtual Machines.
• Information and Diagnostics
° Virtual Machines and Runtime Engines: Information about the software Virtual Machines (VM), Runtime Engines (RE) and software engines installed on your computer.
° Cryptography and Certificates: Information about the cryptographic providers, algorithms and security certificates installed on your computer.
° Sessions: Information about the client sessions hosted by your computer under Terminal Services.
° Users and Groups: Information about the users and user group accounts registered on your computer and on your domain.
• Wireless Support: Information about the wireless (802.11a/b/g/n) networks and devices in addition to the Bluetooth, IrDA (Infrared) and networking capabilities.
• Enhanced Network (LAN/WAN) Capabilities
° Bluetooth Devices and Networks
° Wireless Devices and Networks
° Terminal Servers
° Universal Plug & Play (UPnP) Devices and Networks
• New Advanced Charting Capabilities
° Differences Chart: view the differences between the tested device and reference devices.
° Components Chart: contrast the indexes against one another for both current and reference device.
° Performance vs. Speed: contrast the results against device speed (MHz, bps, etc.); how much more performance do you get from a faste device?
° Performance vs. Power: contrast the results against device power (TDP); how much more power does a faster device consume?
With each release, we add new support and compatibility for the latest hardware, architectures and operating systems, and this is no exception. SiSoftware continues to work with hardware vendors to ensure the best support for new emerging hardware.
Tags: adding, age, Apple, ark, benchm, components, computer, count, cp, dev, diag, ESTABLISHED, etc, extensions, Framework, Free, Hardware, IDE, image, Internet News, iso, Linux, list, memory, Module, modules, Operations, option, Plugins, proc, process, RAM, release, Security, server, Software, Solaris, SUN, technology, terminal, Windows
26 Dec
We have gathered 13 of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this.
Now on to the list!
Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in August, to the great frustration of its millions of users, Skype stopped working for almost two days. The culprit? Windows Update, apparently.
In November, a truck rammed into a power transformer and cut power to RackSpace’s Dallas data center. When their backup power kicked in, the chillers failed to start, and lots of customer servers had to be shut down. Among the affected were GigaOM, 37 Signals, Webmaster World and Laughing Squid.
Easily the most popular website traffic monitoring service on the web, Google Analytics can’t have problems without a lot of people noticing. And they did…
This major San Francisco data center outage back in July may have affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident in 2007: Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp were among the affected. Let’s just say that backup power won’t do you much good if your generators fail to start, which is what happened here.
Twitter seems to be the service that can do no wrong in the eyes of its users. Not even a total of six days of downtime has stopped the service from becoming one of the big successes in 2007. A recent move to a new data center will hopefully help their performance in 2008.
When the 7.04 release of the popular Linux distribution was released in April, the Ubuntu.com website drowned in traffic to the extent that the site stopped working, and later had to use a simplified landing page to handle the load.
Google’s mega-popular Blogger service has had several hiccups in 2007. That, and Google also managed to remove their own blog by accident.
When more than 175,000 websites are left stranded for several days, you just know that someone will notice…
Their main data center in Seattle was flooded after a torrent of more than four inches of rain early in December. The T-Mobile website, their activation portals and several other services stopped working.
People love a good deal. So much, in fact, that several large e-commerce websites couldn’t handle the pressure on Black Friday, including Sears.com and Macys.com.
This web host has had a tough year after introducing their much-hyped grid hosting service late in 2006. In December, Media Temple gave their grid-service customers two months of credited hosting fees and apologized for recent performance problems.
Major customer dissatisfaction with failing domain name renewals that struck this company early in 2007 wasn’t exactly helped by the significant amounts of downtime clocked by the RegisterFly website.
They may be responsible for a large part of the internet backbone, but they are definitely not immune to website trouble.
Each year the internet has its share of disasters and incidents of more or less serious nature. It’s an inevitable fact of life online. Hopefully 2008 will be a little less troublesome (and hopefully pigs will soon be able to fly).
Tags: 365 main, black friday, blogger, Cisco, data center, downtime, e-Commerce, Engineering, Google, google analytics, Internet, media temple, navisite, Operations, outage, pingdom, registerfly, t mobile, twitter, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Web 2.0