Marc's Linux howtos

Software RAID under Linux is a rock solid solution for building RAID arrays at no cost. I personnally never had problems with software raid under Linux while i've seen expensive hardware RAID card failing and corrupting arrays. It's a little slower that hardware RAID but it remove a possible point of failure in a system and again, it's free. The only drawback is that configuration can be sometimes tricky. This guide is a collection of command you can use in different situation.

While was looking for a captcha class for PHP, I found securimage. It's great but not very strong "out of the box".

With some modifications, I came up with a very strong way to create captcha directly with PHP. It use a variety of fonts, backgrounds and a dictionnary of words from a random book on Gutenberg. To make sure the captcha is readable, a function calculate the luminosity difference between the text and 2 colors in the background.

This is part 2 article about creating a lightweight but effective PHP framework. This class is mostly copy/paste from this page but with some useless methods removed and I added the possibility to use multiple databases. This class is nice because it offers simple debug tools and return data as object.

Installing alternative PHP cache can greatly improve the speed of your PHP scripts by keeping a compiled version of your scripts in the ram. Installation was done on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server with a pre-existing apache/php/mysql setup. Run the following commands :

My previous script using mysqldump was slowing down Apache, it became unresponsive for a few seconds, so I wrote this one using mysqlhotcopy. It's much faster and doesn't slow down my webserver.