Jacques’ Brain Drain

I recently went throught a drought of blog posting. This happened primarily because my trailer was stolen, and I didn’t feel like doing much beyond the necessary. While it was recovered a few days later, cleaning up all the mess and paperwork was a bit much, and didn’t improve my mood or my time availability.

Fortunately, things are doing better at the moment – and I can (hopefully) get back here to blog more regularly.

I spent the evening rebuilding a web server that will be running Apache 2.0.x. While doing so, I found an interesting situation with respect to the standard Apache configuration on Ubuntu 5.04. The standard configuration uses a namevirtualhost directive to set up multiple virtual servers on the machine. This is normal.  The problem is that when Apache reads the default website configuration, it does a DNS lookup, and finds the host’s fully qualified domain name (FQDN). After that, any virtual host directives that try to use that name as the ServerName just don’t work. Worse, they fail silently!!! This is not good, because they cause the box to send the ugly default Apache page instead of my beautifully hand-crafted html.
The easy workaround is to put a ServerName directive into the default site setup which goes to nowhere in particular (I used nowhere.jricher.com). This avoids the reverse DNS lookup, and then the virtualhost section for the server’s hostname works just fine.

What is really annoying is that I couldn’t find a decent article on debugging Apache virtual host setups. If there had been a single one-liner in the Apache virtual host docs which mentioned the use of apache2ctl -S I would probably have saved myself several hours of trouble.

Note for the unwise:

apachectl (apache2ctl on Ubuntu, Debian, and some others) can be convinced to dump the virtual host setup for the box by using the ”-S” option. It’s not documented anywhere. I got the command option from a guy on IRC who was helping me debug this mess. Remember, for apache virtual host trouble use “apachectl -S”. End sermon…

I put in another long blinking night doing systems administration. Lessons learned…

• Mysql 4.0.x doesn’t like quotes around the database names in the ‘use’ command


• Mysql 4.0.x doesn’t like ‘default charset=latin1’


• Mysql 4.1.x mysqldump outputs both of those – thus requiring use of emacs to make things work when you’re migrating/moving databases between the two.


• SCP rocks


• it’s possible to upgrade the OS of a linode from ubuntu 4.10 to 5.04 (warty warthog to breezy badger) by editing the sources.list file and using apt-get. It works well, but you’ll get awefully tired of staring at the screen with white knuckles before it’s all over.


• Rsync also rocks


• Most people wouldn’t believe how much stuff you can really run on a single linode.

The program I’m writing is beginning to come together. I have now gotten the web applications framework cleanly talking to the database back-end and the rss parser. At this point, I have a functional, but not yet feature complete, RSS feed reader.

My plan at this point is to write a few methods to integrate that functionality more completely into the web application framework – thus making it feature complete. Then, I intend to add methods to create a “wiki” style notebook functionality. Last, I intend to create import and export tools so that a bunch of related pages within the notebook can be linked together and exported as an RSS file with a set of enclosures – and such a file with enclosures can be imported into a wiki notebook.

The plan is for this to become a framework for remixing information the way people remix music. I eventually intend to integrate fckeditor to simplify editing the individual “wiki” style pages – that will make life easier for people with a less technical background. (It will also mean hacking FCKEditor to support intra-page links, but that should be doable.)

A student at my complex tossed out a portable computer desk today. Since it was a bit larger and sturdier than the piece of particle-board junk I had been using, I decided to do a quick desk upgrade. The top of it is just a bit beat up, but when I pick up my router in RI this fall, I’ll just glue a new sheet of laminate over the old one, and the rest can stay just the way it is.

One of the major ups to doing this is that the new desk can be cracked down and packed flat in about a minute. The old one was held together with about 30 screwa, and took about 45 minuttes to disassemble and prep to move. This one also takes up less space in storage. This will be important when I move in a few weeks.