The big problem with Plesk Panel is that you can have a hard time working around it and changing its defaults.

In my case I wanted to configure Apache to listen on a different port than the default 80, in order to put Varnish in front of it. If you change it manually in the vhost config files and httpd.conf (talking here in particular about CentOS) it might work for a while but next time you make a change in the Plesk Panel everything is going to come back to default.

Changing default Apache port with Plesk Panel

The solution is to run the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --set-http-port --port=8080
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-all

This changes the default http port that Plesk is going to use for HTTP vhosts and then reconfigure-all is going to rewrite the whole set of config files.

Installing Varnish

Please refer to http://blog.quilitz.de/2010/02/varnish-on-centos/ or other articles that you can find on Google, this one should be easy using yum.

Moving Varnish to port 80

On CentOS, you have to reconfigure Varnish to listen on port 80. This can be done in /etc/sysconfig/varnish. Look for DAEMON_OPTS and change it to look like the following:

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
           -T localhost:6082 \
           -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
           -s file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,1G"

On Ubuntu, this can be done in /etc/default/varnish

Very very basic Varnish configuration

Please first make a backup of /etc/varnish/default.vcl so that you can come back to it whenever necessary. This is how it should look like for you:

backend default {
   .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "8080";
}

This entry was written by Valentin, posted on March 11, 2011 at 1:34 pm, filed under Server administration and tagged centos, plesk, sysadmin, varnish. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

At Joy Group we are building a website that needs a lot of real-time interaction with data, thus caching is quite a question. I took the responsibility for performance and will try to build an interesting around-the-main-app system using node.js (actually express.js), memcached, comet, varnish, drupal and other technologies.

I will come up with more information in the future, as time permits.

This entry was written by Valentin, posted on October 16, 2010 at 12:57 pm, filed under Nirvana. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

After a long and very busy time I have managed to allocate an hour to update my portfolio. Now it feels so much better to see all the work I’ve done lately and all the people I’ve met as a direct result.

I’ve been working with Joy Group, Almere, Netherlands for 1.5 years now and I am as happy as ever. The company has grown exponentially even in this difficult economic period. The company as well as myself have been crazily busy, with new opportunities knocking all the time.

Also, as a strategic move, we’ve decided to stop using Zend Framework and become a fully featured Drupal shop. I welcome this decision and have started to go Drupal myself, finding it fascinating with every new bit of information I learn.

This entry was written by Valentin, posted on at 12:54 pm, filed under Nirvana. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

About the event

GPeC (Gala Premiilor eCommerce) – http://www.gpec.ro has now been at its fifth edition and culminated in the number of Romanian online shops that participated in the contest. GPeC represents a very serious competition with rigorous criteria judged by qualified individuals from the industry.

The high number of contestants emphasizes the interest in self improvement as well as the boom in the online commerce industry in Romania.

My involvement

I’ve been invited as a jury member to the contest held in Bucharest at Ramada Parc Hotel on September 2, 2010. There was a lot of work to be done, I had to decide 649 marks for the 12 shops, 59 criteria for each of them. These included design, usability, technical functionality, information architecture, user experience, as well as the shopping experience. This was the first year to include mystery shopping and I must admit that it was quite an experience having to buy products such as scissors and carrots from as much as 600-800 km away. Overall I am very happy with the delivery in our country, considering the bad shape of the roads and general infrastructure.

This entry was written by Valentin, posted on September 4, 2010 at 4:37 pm, filed under Events. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.