So we have a scalable webserver for our static content, now we need to let our crack HTML commandos upload new photos,audio,video to it. For that we need a FTP server.
On our old server, our FTP work-horse was Proftpd. However, we’ve been using it with various patches which are not applicable to the new version [...]

In the last post we discussed how sending Cache-friendly headers made for a much more enjoyable experience for site visitors and also helped reduce bandwith usage and lowered costs for operators.
Let’s say you are web developer showing of your l33t Photoshop skills on such a site and you upload a gif or a png called [...]

The task is simple, setup a webserver to serve images,videos,audios and other static content as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible. A simplistic view would be to just get some fat pipes and a uber-fast i/o system and pump the bits out with a webserver such as Apache .
A few things to keep [...]

When one is faced with migrating a site to a fresh canvas so as to speak, there is a tendency to go for a big bang type launch and try and move everything en-mass and do a cut-over. This is very risky. It’s much better to take smaller sized bites
Let’s review what we have to [...]

So young padawan, are you still with us and wish to learn the Jedi ways
With our servers showing their age and the OS/toolchains aging, we needed to upgrade both hardware and software so we could develop our site in the Web 2.0 manner.
A brief description of what is considered a Web 2.0 application

Clean URLs [...]

When one is embarking on a new venture into the uncharted future, it helps to reflect on the past. We’ll take a brief detour and describe how our current setup came to be
mumineen.org first considered running its own infrastructure around end of 1995. At that time, the internet was primarily accessible in North American universities [...]

It’s been close to 10 years since mumineen.org sent that first piece of email out announcing it’s own mailing list hosted on its own infrastructure. We’ve come a long way since then with more and more services being added. We’ve grown our subscriber base as well as our website readership substantially and our infrastructure (physical [...]