Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with Varnish, this includes testing it within a load balanced environment, putting it behind nginx, putting it in front of Solr, the list goes on.

This blog post will hopefully give you an insight in to a simple way of combining nginx, Varnish and Apache to create a powerful Wordpress environment that can really take a hammering.

I’m going to assume you already have Apache and nginx working together, if not I suggest you read my other articles on these subjects to learn how to combine them.

Installing Varnish

sudo apt-get install varnish

Configuring Apache

I suggest binding Apache to port 81, this is easy to change, open the following file in your favourite editor.

/etc/apache2/ports.conf

Change the Listen and NameVirtualHost lines to:

Listen 81
NameVirtualHost *:81

This will mean you need to go and change all …

First we need to install sshfs.

sudo apt-get install sshfs fuse-utils

Now we make a mount point, I’m going to use a directory in my home directory for this.

mkdir ~/remote-content

And now we simply mount our remote directory to it.

sshfs user@host:/path/to/location ~/remote-content

It’s as simple as that.

Quick introduction

My employers presented me with a challenge this week. The task was not difficult in the end but to me it was an untried concept involving MySQL.

I have never been a fan of MySQL and generally turn my nose at the thought of using it, let alone replicating it etc.

The task in question? Master -> Master -> Slave -> Slave replication.

From this point forward I will expect you to have MySQL installed and set-up as normal.

  • Master 1 will be known as Master 1 and Slave 2 with IP 10.1.1.1
  • Master 2 will be known as Master 2 and Slave 1 with IP 10.1.1.2
  • Slave 1 will be known as Slave 3 with IP 10.1.1.3
  • and Slave 2 will be known as Slave 4 with IP 10.1.1.4

Master 1

Modify your MySQL config file, usually named …