BrianJarrett.com

Several months back I had a catastrophic system failure on my webserver. I was, at the time, running Mandrake Linux and I was using tar to archive all my file, then backing them up on my fileserver. I noticed one day that I was getting core dumps and segmentation faults all over the place and when I tried to reboot the system it died completely. I wouldn’t even boot.

My first thought was that it was a memory problem. I ran a program to test all the memory and it all checked out. I then thought maybe it was a motherboard problem and maybe it was somehow corrupting files. After moving the site to a totally separate box I noticed that the same thing occurred. This time, however, I received a message from cron telling me that there were segmentation faults during my archive job.

Turns out that I was exceeding the max filesize limit for tar. According to the documentation tar can only handle a file up to 2 gigs. My file was 6 gigs. tar handled it okay until the file grew to over 6 gigs, at that point things went very wrong and important system files were …read more »

[Update: I've since discovered you can actually do this on the Windows version when you set up your instance.  It's just a checkbox that needs to be set.]

I recently had a problem with not being able to browse uploaded files in Wordpress after uploading. In Wordpress when writing a page or a post you have the ability to upload files to the webserver and include them (as full-size originals or thumbnails) to the post.

I was able to upload the files without issue and Wordpress created the thumbnail as well. However, I never received the “Browse” tab that would allow me to add the images to the editor (an subsequently to my post).

After some Googling I discovered the issue. I’m running …read more »