HAProxy (High Availability Proxy)

HAProxy(High Availability Proxy) is an open source load balancer which can load balance any TCP service. It is particularly suited for HTTP load balancing as it supports session persistence and layer 7 processing.

HA Proxy Setup  :

I was working with Apache Webserver from very long but when I jumped into the world of NodeJS I started loving websockets. Soon I was planning to integrate my PHP applications with NodeJS. I was happy to use both, till I was not running both the applications on default web service port 80. But when I tried to configure Apache virtual hosting for proxying my request to NodeJS server port, it was not allowing my websocket communication to happen. I tried alot of modules but didn’t got success. And after alot of googling I found something which helped me to achieve what I need. Once I configured HAProxy on my system I was able to serve both applications, PHP and NodeJS through port 80 just by virtual hosting of HAProxy.

Docker : An Introduction to LXC

Docker is an open source project, which packages applications and their dependencies in a virtual container that can run on any Linux server. Docker has immense possibilities as it facilitates the running of several OS's on the same server.

Technology is changing faster than styles in than fashion world, and there are many new entrants specific to the open source, cloud, virtualisation, and DevOps technologies. Docker is one of them. The aim of this article is to give you a clear idea of Docker, its architecture and its functions, before getting started with it. 

Docker is a new open source tool based on Linux container technology(LXC), designed to change how you think about workload/application deployments. It helps you to easily create light-weight, self-sufficient, portable application containers that can be shared, modified and easily deployed to different infrastructure such as cloud/compute servers or bare metal servers. The Idea is to provide a comprehensive abstraction layer that allows developers to 'containerise' or 'package' any application  and have it run on any infrastructure.

Docker is based on container virtualisation and it is not new. There is no better tool than Docker to help manage kernel level technologies such as LXC, cgroups and a copy-on-write filesystems. It helps us manage the complicated kernel layer technologies through tools and APIs.

How to Increase PhpMyAdmin Session Timeout from 1440 seconds

phpMyAdmin is one of my favorite tools and I use it all the time. But man, the 24-minute session timeout is a huge problem . A short cookie lifetime is all well and good on your production server, but what about when you’re just testing new things  away on the computer in your test envirnment?
Did a little grepping and found that you can override this setting, even though it’s not documented anywhere but in the codes (so far as I can tell). To override it, just open up config.inc.php in the root phpMyAdmin directory and add this setting (anywhere, but  mostly at end of file):
phpmyadmin config file for ubuntu Server : /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = <your_new_timeout>;

Where <your_new_timeout> is some number larger than 1800. Personally, I chose 28800, which is 8 hours.

Define how long a login cookie is valid. Please note that php configuration option session.gc_maxlifetime might limit session validity and if the session is lost, the login cookie is also invalidated. So it is a good idea to set session.gc_maxlifetime at least to the same value of $cfg['LoginCookieValidity'].
php.ini file for ubuntu Server : /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Disclaimer! It should go without saying that increasing the timeout is a (comparatively minor) security risk (but a risk nonetheless). Obviously, do not do this on your production server. And as always, proceed with caution.