rootninja

The food and restaurant industry might be down across the board, but some areas seem to be doing quite fine. Amazon is reporting record sales this year. http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/daily-news/081230-Amazon-Reports-Record-Holiday-Sales/

I was in a mall today and saw a line 20 deep in the food court for Taco Bell. People gotta eat, and they need their latest and greatest software too. I’m sure the net is lagging behind the economy, but in some regards I guess it might not turn out to be a bad year for Linux. I’m sure the usual suspects will be feeling a nasty bite soon and although they might not really have their hearts behind anything that has to do with free, according to Bruce Byfield, “when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and actually benefiting from the hard times expected next year.” http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3793286/Linux+in+2009:+Recession+vs.+GNU.htm

Economy, Linux 2009, Economy, foss, free, gloomy, GNU, Linux, recession

Lets get a running start… Make sure KeepAlive is set to ‘On’, HostnameLookups is ‘Off’ and comment out most of the modules loaded in your default Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, other bloated distribution’s choice for default modules. Most of them you won’t need or want to have available. You’ll probably need rewrite and php, but depending on what kind of site you’re running, you might not need all those auth modules, etc.  If you’re hosting some apps that handle their own authentication and permissions and you dont want to allow directory browsing, statistics generation, ldap authentication, or apache statistics then by all means get rid of all those modules! In Fedora you’ll find they throw in the kitchen sink to start you off.

http://blog.rootninja.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/treadmill.jpg” alt=”apache on a diet - running on a treadmill” class=”alignleft” />

Putting your apache on a diet and then restarting might be all the oomph you need, but you’ll probably see only a slight difference. Also, don’t just look at the memory usage right after a restart. Until your servers are actually called upon for battle, they’re just going to allocate the minimum requirements, so you might have a bunch of httpd’s running using say 10 meg each, but once they’re stressed, you might see them jump to to 20-30 meg and not let go. You’re probably going to get the most mileage out of tuning the number of servers running, maximum clients, minimum and maximum spare’s, etc. If you’re not expecting a lot of traffic and your memory is limited, you probably shouldn’t run a boat load of servers. Keep your MaxClients low so you don’t spawn so many that you start swapping right from the word go.

Your site, your traffic, and the type of content being loaded is going to affect your optimal settings. So just dive in and play around with the numbers.  Stress test your site and let it run a little while. If it gets better, then you’re probably pushing the numbers in the right direction! I’m sorry if you were looking for a “type 123 at prompt xyz” type of tutorial here. What’s working for me with 128 meg of memory is probably a little slim for the next guy.

I just hate to see people jump ship from apache to something like lighty just because they hear apache is bloated or experience that from their distribution’s default setup. Switching to another web server may just give yourself more headaches in the long run because you’re probably going to have to tweak lighty to work with the apps you’d like to run — apps that are already set up to work with apache right out of the box.

Linux apache, bloat, diet, lighttpd, lighty, memory, modules, requirements, server, tune, web

When you get to the first prompt when installing, instead of just letting the default continue by itself, type:

Replace the ‘reiserfs’ with ‘jfs’ if you want that file system.  You’ll have to include the selinux=0 because you can’t use SELinux with ReiserFS or JFS.

All too easy…http://www.rootninja.com/images/darth-vader-helmet2.jpg” />

Linux fc10, fedora, howto, jfs, reiserfs, selinux

I put up a new 404 page. Hopefully Chuck Norris will allow it to live. I’ll make it a regular page linked from rootninja too.

Uncategorized 404, chuck norris

Iterators in python are so easy. I saw some articles on random sites about building generators to do stuff, but in the end they were only trying to iterate through a file line by line so why make it harder on yourself. Declare an iterator of the type you’re dealing with, like lines in a file, and vrooom, off you go.

programming code, easy button, iterators, python

I just read a horrendous article on a wannabe news site called “The Hollywood Reporter” where the author, Paul Bond, devastatingly butchered definitions and skipped any attempt at providing even a miniscule speck of detail from the report he sourced.  It basically looked like he strung together a bunch of single sentence paragraphs and flung them into what he describes as a news article, shockingly similar to the way an orangutan throws poo in the zoo.
http://blog.rootninja.com“>http://blog.rootninja.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/orangutan.jpg” alt=”news reporting done zoo animal dung throwing style” width=”185″ height=”199″ />
I had to post this because I completely agree with faptzu’s comment,

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ic41d147829e712a6a6ecd990ea3a349c

Almost random babyboomers, butcher, comments, current events, fail, genx, hollywood, news, poo

If you see this message when firefox tries to load flash content:

Then do this:  (replace with your home dir)

and you should get that response and it should work the next time you try as long as you’ve got the right plugin association and the file you’re trying to load really is flash!

Uncategorized blocking, firefox, flash, iced-tea, plugins, selinux

Cron is so simple yet so useful I think it’s often unappreciated! Being able to toss a command into a cron, or execute a script at specific times of the day, days of the week, etc. That’s good stuff!

You could call a script that checks your mail once an hour, cleans out a temporary directory, or archives a special directory where you dump files to get saved without ever having to visit the server manually and tar/gzip the files yourself.

My latest use for cron is a nightly build script for building code checked out of subversion.  I’m doing this on my system for personal use, but also at work along with a python script i’m writing that also runs from a cron a few hours later.  It parses the build log looking for errors.  If it sees errors, it sends them out in email.  Python is wonderful… /off topic.

If you want to run a script called check-for-rootkits.sh every 10 minutes, its as easy as:

You could also get fancy and use “run as” to run crons as specific users.  Users can do this on their own (”crontab -e”), but you could force things to happen for them with your root crons if you wanted.  Fedora makes use of this for running hourly and nightly cron directories.  If you want anything to run along with the standard Fedora cron jobs, you just drop your script into those directories and they fire off alongside the defaults.

Linux cron, fedora, Linux, subversion

Mmm… Hydrogen. Leave a comment if you’re an HHO’er. If you don’t know what HHO refers to, or you disagree with the definition. I’m curious to see if anyone stops by!

Uncategorized

The evil google empire has singled out my website and banned me for no apparent reason what-so-ever.  Those pricks couldn’t handle stroking the big $11 check once every few months for my super duperest blog.

The Google Team is out to get you, how to make them pay in 4 easy steps:

My Adsense account got banned.  Help!

Uncategorized adsense, ban, google, money, silly