This was a whole month and a bit ago, and I never got around to throwing it here on the site, but I will now announce that I am a Red Hat Certified System Adminstrator!

Following on from my previous video, showing how to install PHP 5.5 on CentOS 6, I now complete the tasks needed to meet the requirements for installing Moodle 2.7 on CentOS, and replace the Oracle MySQL distribution with MariaDB 5.5.

As always, feedback is appreciated!

I have been inspired once again to fire up my screencasting rig, to show you how to install PHP 5.5 on CentOS 6 using Rackspace’s IUS Community Repositories.

More and more web applications now are likely to require versions of PHP beyond 5.3. CentOS 6 users are stuck with 5.3, with backported security updates, unless they diverge from standard repositories or compile PHP themselves! Until CentOS 7 is with us, those of us trying to run a rock-solid web server on CentOS will be left out in the cold running recent web applications like Moodle 2.7 which require a newer PHP.

In this video, I show you how to use the IUS repositories to get PHP 5.5 running. These repositories, with their Rackspace backing, seem likely to be nice and stable going forward.

As always, I’d love any feedback you might have.

It has been far too long since a video tutorial made its debut here, so I would like to introduce a new tutorial!

Cacti is a great graphing and monitoring tool, but I have struggled in the past with getting it installed, and getting it to do what I want. It can be a little bit complex and fiddly, but recently I have had more success and am putting it to good use measuring and graphing more things.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through installing Cacti on a basic CentOS 6 system with Apache, PHP and MySQL already installed. By the end of the video, it is collecting information for the default graphs in the default installation.

I hope to extend this video series soon with some details about the additional graphs I have recently succeeded at getting installed.

As always, your comments and feedback are appreciated!