Year: 2015

How to use the new Apple System Font SAN FRANCISCO on your website

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Apple have a new System Font in El Capitan and all of their other products starting 2015: it’s called San Francisco. It’s very similar to their previous font Helvetica Neue, but apparently San Francisco is better for your eyes (not to mention the fact that Helvetica Neue isn’t owned by Apple, and obviously we can’t … Read more

OS X Server vs. Parallels Desktop – Overhead Differences

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Screen Shot 2015-11-04 at 10.28.17

Ever wondered if there’s a difference in overhead and memory usage when you’re using a VM instead of OS X directly? Here’s a comparison for website hosting.

The above graph shows the difference of hosting one of my websites for the last few days on OS X Server (in blue) that I got from Hostgator (using their HostGator Thanksgiving Deal 2016 coupon), and in a CentOS VM under Parallels Desktop 10 on the same hardware (in red).

The traffic logs show that the amount of requests and visitors has remained the same, so we can deduce that the load put on either OS X and the VM is the same. There is a little more overhead when using the VM, but not as much as I had feared: the requests have to be forwarded to another software layer after all, and that takes some CPU power.

Let’s have a look at memory next:

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How to install MySQL on Mac OS X El Capitan

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MySQL 2015

There are several ways to install MySQL on your Mac, for example:

  • compile from source
  • use the Homebrew package manager (http://brew.sh)
  • use a nifty script courtesy of Mac Mini Vault (http://git.io/eUx7rg)
  • or use the dedicated MySQL installer package (recommended)

I recommend the dedicated installer because it’s the only package that will also add a convenient Preference Pane for starting and stopping the service.

In this article I’ll focus on the latter, and I’ll also talk you through how to add MySQL to the PATH variable and how to secure MySQL to keep the evildoers away from your server.

These instructions will work on Yosemite and El Capitan (I’ve tested it on both systems – in fact that’s part of why I’m writing this, so that I can remember for next time).

 

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 10.40.12

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How to disable SSH access from everywhere except for certain IPs in CentOS 7

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Here’s how to do it: firewall-cmd –zone=internal –add-service=ssh –permanent firewall-cmd –zone=internal –add-source=1.2.3.4/32 –permanent firewall-cmd –zone=internal –add-source=5.6.7.8/32 –permanent firewall-cmd –zone=public –remove-service=ssh –permanent firewall-cmd –reload This declares an internal zone with two IPs (add as many or as few as you like) and subsequently removes the SSH service from the public zone altogether. As a result, any … Read more

WordPress 111: Users, Roles and Capabilities

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In this video I’ll show you the multi-user capabilities of WordPress: how to create new users, and what capabilities the different user roles have over your WordPress site. This feature comes in handy if you collaborate with other users: each user can create posts, but such users can be restricted from deleting other people’s posts, … Read more

WordPress 110: URLs and Permalinks

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In this episode I’ll explain how you can change the URLs for your posts and pages, as they appear in your web browser. By default, WordPress uses numeric links (such as domain.com?p=123) but those are not so easy on the eye. We can change this to something like domain.com/awesome-post instead, and I’ll explain how to … Read more