Archive for the 'Apache' Category

Just to let everyone know I’ve poked my head in the Apache2 hanging on digest generation problem again, and figured out a better solution than relying on rng-utils.

Check it out.

I’m trying to import a brand new top secret project into my Subversion Repository.

Okay, I’ve had my share of troubles with that set-up — it is behind an Apache Reverse Proxy, with a bit of perl hacking to support move operations accross SSL tunnels. (I’ll post about this soon, I’m sure it will interest someone).

So, I was trying to import my new project and BANG, it dies.

Ajout          public/javascripts/application.js
Ajout          public/javascripts/controls.js
Ajout          public/404.html
Ajout          public/index.html
Ajout          public/.htaccess
svn: PUT of '/svn/repos/!svn/xx/.htaccess': 
302 Found (https://www.underwares.org)
svn: Le message de propagation a été laissé dans un fichier temporaire :
svn:    'svn-commit.4.tmp'

I first wonder the meaning of such foolery (foolery that has nothing to do with Tom, whatsoever) and then slap my forehead loudly.

Read the rest of this entry »

iCal. Such a nice calendering application that is, and a pioneer in the vastly used ics calendar format. Is it the ultimate calendar ever? Well, almost.

What drove me insane was that, while you can publish your calendars to a WebDAV server for others to see and subscribe to, you cannot edit the calendars that are published — unless you have a .mac account. While I sincerly hope this will be in Leopard, I’m not holding my breath.

You see, I run Linux on my desktop at home, and Mac OS X on my laptop, for work. I just wanted to find a simple way to share my calendar between the two machines, and to be able to edit them on any machine.

And it just so happens I just have the solution. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a machine on my network that is very special. It’s a rather old Quad Xeon, an HP LH4 that I scavenged out of the proverbial dumpster of a buisness that didn’t want it anymore. In fact, they were about to trash six of them.

I decided it was a crime to shitcan such beautiful machines, so with the help of my friend Mike “I mangle french words” Le Blanc, we drove there, armed with a large truck and patience. Carrying them down the three stories with no elevator was an interesting experience. I scavenged lots and lots of interesting hardware there.

But i’m getting ahead of myself here. The point is, lots of screwy things start occuring when you have a Quad SMP machine, such a timers and clock drift. I started having a lot of problems with Apache recently… once in a blue moon, on restart, it would spawn a single process with no PID file, and hang there. Checking out error_log pointed out that apache would apparently hang while generating the Secret seed for Digest authentication (mod_digest). Disabling mod_digest would have worked, but sadly, I use it. This could be found in error_log:

[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...
[notice] Digest: done
[notice] Apache configured -- resuming normal operations
[notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec2)
[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...

Fortunately, I cobbled up a fix. Updated! Read on for a more elegant fix. Read the rest of this entry »