BenV's notes

A few weeks ago I implemented a FastCGI setup for a magento website. (details Here). That site also runs google analytics.
Here’s what analytics had to show about the speed of the site:

Can you guess when FastCGI was enabled? 😉
For those of you who are graphically challenged, the above graph shows a loading time of 2.1-2.5 seconds on the left and then crashes down to only 1.0-1.3 seconds at the date that I enabled FastCGI. Neat huh? 🙂

Google analytics also notes that “this site is faster than 83% of the sites”, whatever that means. Oh well, we’re happy.

This morning I noticed my torrent daemon (aka Deluge) was down. (continue reading…)

As I love to tinker around with apache/php installations to get them to work as fast as possible while still keeping some security in tact, I found myself messing around with FastCGI today. But why?! Here’s why:
On this machine I previously installed suPhP to get php scripts to run as a normal unix user instead of user apache (so users have the ability to completely lock out their database settings etc for other users on that machine). However, to speed stuff up on a magento webshop I wanted to have a PHP opcode cache running (I tried out APC). (continue reading…)

Here we go again, wordpress has an update to version 2.9 this time.

New features include “automatic database optimization support”, which you can enable by putting define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true); in your wp-config.php file.
The rest you’ll run into yourself, it’s a ton of new stuff and fixes but some cool stuff like a built-in image editor and easier embedding of your favorite youtube junk.

Needless to say the automatic upgrade failed AGAIN for me:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.9.zip.

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1560944 bytes received

Installation Failed

Fortunately, my previous patch still works. Get it here if you want.

After patching that single line the automagic upgrade ended with: WordPress upgraded successfully. Jeeeej.
However, they still left the timeout at 60 seconds in the newer version 🙁

# grep wp_remote_get wp-admin/includes/file.php
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 60));

Failers. They deserve a 56k6 modem for their servers so they can find out about these issues themselves 😉

Don’t ask me why, but for some greasemonkey script that I wanted to run in Firefox I needed Google Gears.
So I went to the gears site with Firefox, and it told me that it needed to install some plugin. Yeah, whatever.
I hit the big Install Gears button, completely ignoring the tiny and almost invisible for my eyes 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported) notice below it.
Needless to say it went on to download a 3.5Mb package, started some popups and other junk after which it notified me of my grave mistake.
Aha. So for some reason Google is too incompetent to work with 64 bits software…. even microsoft can deal with that these days guys, geesh. (continue reading…)

Time to continue our adventure into Sieve land from yesterday.

Yesterday the result was that Sieve scripts could be put in place by the system administrator and they work. Needless to say that’s cumbersome and we want users to handle it themselves.
To avoid all possible issues with opening up FTP / DAV / whatever, the clowns at Dovecot and the ietf have decided to create a new protocol for it. Currently still a draft, but it will be an official protocol called ManageSieve. (continue reading…)

Let’s start with a problem description. We start out with a -working- mailer:
A pretty simple qmail/vpopmail installation with Courier IMAP and the pop3d that comes with qmail. This is administered by users with the qmailadmin frontend and allows for creation of mailboxes and forwards by postmasters. Together with spamdyke and spamassassin it works pretty well. So why change it?

The problem: First of all, Courier is a piece of shit. The various parts of it have broken in various ways over the years (authd hanging for no apparent reason or suddenly eating a ton of memory, stuff like that). Not only that, but they decided that vpopmail wasn’t worth supporting anymore, so their latest release of courier-authlib simply doesn’t handle vpopmail anymore. (don’t ask me why, can’t find any details on it).
Second of all, it would be cool to give our users the ability to create their own custom mail filters on our server. Stuff that you can do in thunderbird or through webmail, so they can setup their mailbox filters and vacation messages and whatever without me having to help them. (well…. we’ll see about that). Needless to say we could do that by giving them access to the .qmail files, but those are way out of their league. Not only that, it would be a security nightmare. So to solve that, we’re trying the Sieve disaster. I mean language… or something. (continue reading…)

So with all the hype around google’s upcoming Chrome OS, I was getting curious what it was all about.
Linux based web stuff, open source… yeah, that’s all cute, but just words. So today the option arrived to see what we’re dealing with. These clowns have a download page where you can download a virtual machine image to check out a snapshot of Chrome OS. (continue reading…)

A while ago a friend hinted me of this printer. We were both looking for a somewhat affordable network laser printer, color preferred. However, I was wondering if this thing would work properly under linux. (continue reading…)

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)