One of the daily routines administrators do is to monitor their web server logs for various interesting things: response codes (i.e. 500), attempts to access restricted pages, user-agents, ips, popular pages, even image hotlinking from other sites. In Linux servers, this can be easily done through shell one-liners involving various tools (tail, awk, sort, cut etc). Here is a bash script I use which automates apache monitoring for a given website.
Tag: Apache
What is Varnish?
Varnish Cache or just Varnish is an open-source HTTP accelerator and caching reverse proxy for web servers, like Apache or nginx, hosting content-heavy dynamic web sites. In non-geek speak, Varnish is an free program which runs in front of your web server (which in this context is called backend or origin) and stores (caches) a copy of each webpage served by the web server. When a user requests a cached page, Varnish steps in and serves the cached copy instead of requesting the same page again and again from the backend server. So Varnish is ideal for developers who run high traffic sites with lots of visitors and like their web application to be highly available and running fast. This how-to is an attempt to present a comprehensive but simple introductory guide to Varnish configuration for web developers who want to scale their projects gracefully.
