How to find cause of heavy usage on your Apache webserver

Here’s a quick and dirty tips on how to find cause of heavy CPU resources usage on your Apache webserver (especially when running php scripts).

First you need to locate the Apache 2 “access.log” file. By default in Ubuntu, this file is located in “/var/logs/apache2” directory.

Then you need to run this command to find out which IP address accesses your website the most in a short time.
[code]
tail -10000 access.log| awk ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq -c |sort -n
[/code]

The output of the command should contain a list of IP addresses along with the number of hits it made in the last 10,000 access of your website
[code]
47 117.58.252.98
81 202.124.242.186
84 202.124.245.26
182 194.164.101.217
220 208.101.22.146
225 72.167.131.144
3946 93.135.xxx.xxx
[/code]

From here you can easily locate the offending ip address and proceed to block it from accessing your website further using .htaccess file or other blocking method.

Here is an example to block certain ip address from accessing your website using .htaccess file
[code] order deny,allow
deny from 93.135.xxx.xxx
[/code]

Save .htaccess file in the root directory of your web server (example /var/www), and the ip address wont be available to access your site again.

Hope that would help you!

Linux Laptop Hardware Compatibility List

If you are a serious Linux user, probably the first thing that come across your mind when shopping for a laptop is how compatible it is with GNU/Linux operating system.

Fortunately sites like The Linux Laptop Wiki, Ubuntu Linux Hardware Support and Mandriva Hardware Database provides a good starting point to find out about your laptop hardware compatibility with Linux.

As for my personal experience, I find out most hardware incompatibility ranges from unsupported 56k softmodem driver to unsupported hard-disk controller which i consider as the worse case scenario.

So please bear this in mind that not all laptop are 100% compatible with Linux. Do ask around, and check for its compatibility status before you finally made a decision to purchase a new laptop.

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex has been released, but my pc died!

Probably most of you have heard about the latest Ubuntu release – Intrepid Ibex, with all of its nifty features, including :

  • The new Network Manager 0.7 (which supports 3G broadband connection)
  • Support guest login support
  • Encrypted private directory support (via encryptfs)

The only thing that might need a little bit polishing is Cruft Remover tool, which happily classify important files as unneeded files to be deleted (which is dangerous).

but the sad part was….

I don’t know if this is a coincidence or otherwise, but my 7 years old Pentium 4 1.8 GHz died shortly before Intrepid Ibex release. I’m now left with an aged laptop and unreliable wifi internet access at my current workplace to surf the internet.

Bottom line – I might need a new PC.

Ubuntu Mobile on Asus EeePC

Found this on youtube, thought might share with all of you..

Ubuntu Mobile is a specialized Ubuntu distribution which intended to run on UMPC powered by Intel Atom processor. From what I read, current release of Ubuntu Mobile still does not have wifi support for Asus EeePC, a netbook which for me I think nice to have.

You can find more about it at the Ubuntu Mobile Official Website or download the image at http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogra/mobile/