Configuring Sendmail to relay through Gmail SMTP

Sending email directly from the MTA (mail transfer agent) on one’s server is now considered to be faux pas. Unless you’ve got that machine configured within DNS (MX record, reverse lookup, etc), it’d likely fail most basic spam checks at the destination mail server. The complexity of the configuration increases if you’ve got the need to masquerade emails from multiple domains. (more…)

Dissecting Amazon Web Services

Just reading this article on AWS and thought I’d share some interesting numbers (in addition to the Quantcast data I shared earlier):

• 52 billion objects are stored in S3 and that S3 requests regularly peak at 80,000 requests per second.
• EC2 is experiencing monthly growth of “almost 10%.”
• Amazon has U.S. data centers in Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, and St. Louis, and international data centers in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. (more…)

httpd: accelerate web page performance with mod_expires

More and more goodies are packaged with apache2, allowing one to perform front-end engineering right out of the box. Here are a tip on using mod_expires to maximize the use of browser cache and accelerate performance for repeat visitors. (more…)