Simon Krenger

This is a bit of an unusual review since I am reviewing… a bag! I could not find any other review of the bag mentioned here on the internet, so here it goes…

Update: For more images, recommendations and a report after one year of usage, see my follow-up.

Since my old laptop bag I used for work and school was a bit beaten up, I looked for a new bag for daily usage. I then came across the Freitag website. Freitag fabricates bags made from used truck tarps, safety belts and bicycle inner tubes. A friend of mine already had a Freitag bag and I decided to order a bag for myself. Now I only had to decide which one it was going to be.
My requirements where simple:

• Rugged, rain-proof
• Big enough for schoolbooks and papers
• A 15″ laptop fits inside

So I basically had the choice between the “Dragnet”, “Top Cat”, “Joe” and “Rex”. As you probably already read in the title, I chose a “Dragnet” bag, simply because Freitag states:

Due to popular demand on my other post including the build process, I hereby provide the compiled version of the Tanuki Java Service Wrapper 3.4.1 for Windows x64 (Community Edition) for you to download. The software was built using the instructions included in my other post.

Use this package at your own risk, I provide no support or guarantee that this software works as advertised.

This software is provided “AS IS” and any expressed or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed.

To run the Service Wrapper, extract the following three files from the archive:

• bin/wrapper.exe
• lib/wrapper.dll
• lib/wrapper.jar

Download: wrapper_3.4.1_krenger_build.zip (aka wrapper-windows-x86-64-3.4.1.zip)
Newer versions: Newer versions of the wrapper are available here.

The only thing I ask in return is a comment if this actually helped you :)

I was not pleased with the results of my database tweaks. So I looked further to improve the performance of this blog and stumbled upon XCache. Developed by the same people that created lighttpd, XCache is a PHP opcode cacher that greatly improves WordPress performance.

Using the same Java program I used in my previous tests, I queried the website 500 times and packed the data into a graph. This is what showed up:

Now that is what I am talking about! The query time is nearly three times as fast as before.

I am still looking into other cachers like Alternative PHP Cache (APC), but I like xcache so far.

To launch any Java program as a service, you might have to use a wrapper. This article shows how to build a current release of the Tanuki Service Wrapper (x64) from source. Tanuki Software provides three versions of the Java Service wrapper:

• Professional Edition (paid)
• Standard Edition (paid)
• Community Edition (free)

The paid versions of the wrapper require the configuration file to contain a machine-specific license key in order to function. When you use any x64 version of Windows as your host system, you are forced to either buy licenses or build the Wrapper from source, since they do not provide the binaries for the Community Edition. So here, we are going to build the Community Edition from source.

Update: I added a compiled version for Windows x64 in another post
Newer versions: Newer versions of the wrapper are available here.

Today I wondered how my newly purchased Virtual Server performs under load. I am currently using lighttpd as a webserver and MySQL as the database for WordPress. I already knew that MySQL features the Query Cache, which stores the result of issued queries in memory (Oracle’s equivalent of this would be the Result Cache in Oracle 11g). I wondered how much this feature could improve performance on a normal WordPress blog.

I quickly wrote a small Java program to query my website (source code available here: TestWebPerfo.java) and retrieve the performance metrics from the HTML source code. I then ran it 500 times to get my metrics without the Query Cache turned on. Average time for building the website: 0.115 seconds.

Having security in mind, I had some concerns granting all privileges to the WordPress MySQL user (see the instructions from WordPress):

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON databasename.* TO "wordpressusername" [..]

After all, with these privileges the WordPress user would be able to access other databases on this server and do whatever he likes. WordPress has become very popular and is a known target for exploits and the like (as a quick search on milw0rm.com will confirm). I didn’t like that idea.

So here is what I did:

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE, DELETE ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpress' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypass';

This works fine so far and I don’t think my WordPress installation needs more privileges. Note that the ALTER and DROP statements are missing from my list, which could interfere with future updates. But we’ll see…

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Thank you, very kind. Let’s see what we have here…

Today I finally received the credentials for my new rootserver from HostEurope. So far everything went well and quickly I was able to set up a webserver.

So far, so good. I am going to post some more content in the following days.