View request in Varnish (varnishncsa) Posted on March 22, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

Well it’s quite simple, use the command “varnishncsa”. You can use i.e. grep to view specific lines. Read More

EC2 increase EBS size for linux Posted on March 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

Increasing an EBS is very simple.  If you’re looking to decrease EBS size for linux, click here. First thing, increase the volume itself: Stop your EC2 utilizing the EBS, do NOT terminate it! Goto the Volumes section under Elastic Block Store. … Read More

Using cURL to store cookie session into variables / object Posted on January 31, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

To keep the cookie session in a variable (instead of CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR), Make sure you have CURLOPT_HEADER and CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT enabled. CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION must be set to false, Otherwise your cookie won’t send correctly (That is where CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR works best). Use preg_match_all to … Read More

PayPal IPN Simulator Could not send IPN (HTTPS) Posted on January 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

So sadly PayPal’s IPN Simulator documentation doesn’t mention this but, you can’t use HTTPS for the simulation.  I don’t know why, but you just can’t.  It only works over HTTP:// – Port 80. Hope this helps for those who search … Read More

Installing MongoDB PHP Driver on Linux, CentOS, Amazon Linux Posted on January 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

A quick instruction set on installing MongoDB PHP Driver on Linux, CentOS, and Amazon Linux, or pretty much any modern linux CLI server. 1. First, figure out if you’re using yum or apt for your local machine software repo. 2. … Read More

Varnish Ban IP Address Posted on January 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

So we had a weird issue a while ago where a anonymous crawler bot was hitting one of our sites very harshly (thousands of pages).   It was eating up a ton of the bandwidth and it refused to obey … Read More

VarnishADM, VarnishTop, VarnishLog – Commands Posted on January 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

So I decided to write this post as I couldn’t find a good clean single pager on it. The commands: VarnishADM ,VarnishTop, VarnishLog. ADM – Allows you to load a new VCL file.  Very useful when you don’t want to … Read More

MongoDB on a 32 bit OS Posted on January 16, 2014 by Michael Mikhjian

Plain and simple – don’t do it.  On a 32-bit machine the MongoDB memory mapped files are capped at 2GB (Same goes to any file on a 32-bit OS). So even if you have a small database size (say 100,000 … Read More

Check all PHP files syntax (Unix) Posted on December 30, 2013 by Michael Mikhjian

This command line is very useful for when wanting to scan a directory of PHP file’s syntax.  I typically run this prior to public uploads – it’s saved me a few times! Goto the primary directory of the application.  Type … Read More

OraGuide Launches to Standardize Website Help Areas Posted on August 24, 2013 by Michael Mikhjian

Screen Shot 2013-08-24 at 11.54.26 AM

OraGuide was created to offer website owners the ability to give their visitors instant help through a popup widget and ongoing feedback loop.

By installing the OraGuide code on their site, website owners can convert their help articles into instant access Guides. When visitors click “Help”, the OraGuide widget immediately pops open ready for action. Read More