Dyna|on|Rails

This is certainly fun.
And styled
And strong
SELECT * FROM users

To be or not to be, whether it’d be nobler

I recently started seriously trying to use Ubuntu Linux on my main computer. It’s been a fun experience so far, however there have been some glitches. For example, while getting the proprietory codecs to work right wasn’t that hard, there was a definite static when playing most mp3 files.

To fix this I had to do the following:
1. Go into System - Preferences - Sound
2. Change the Sound Events to ‘ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture’ (Be sure to hit ‘Test’ to make sure)
3. Change the Music and Movies to ‘ESD - Enlightened Sound Daemon’ (Be sure to hit ‘Test’ to make sure)

Restart your music player of choice, and everything should be better.

Skipping one version, since I got kinda lazy, NginX 0.5.23 is out with some fixes worth an upgrade.

The full changelog:
- Feature: the ngx_http_ssl_module supports Server Name Indication TLS extension.
- Feature: the “fastcgi_catch_stderr” directive.
- Bugfix: a segmentation fault occurred in master process if two virtual servers should bind() to the overlapping ports.
- Bugfix: if nginx was built with ngx_http_perl_module and perl supported threads, then during second reconfiguration the error messages “panic: MUTEX_LOCK” and “perl_parse() failed” were issued.
- Bugfix: in the HTTPS protocol in the “proxy_pass” directive.

Some more updates to NginX got released just today:

- Bugfix: if server has more than about ten locations, then regex locations may be choosen not in that order as they were specified.
- Bugfix: a worker process may got caught in an endless loop on 64-bit platform, if the 33-rd or next in succession backend has failed.
- Bugfix: a bus error might occur on Solaris/sparc64 if the PCRE library was used.
- Bugfix: in the HTTPS protocol in the “proxy_pass” directive.

It’s curious how several of the errors in the recent fixes have specifically come out on a 64-bit platform. I guess we’re still having issues with that just like Vista drivers of the same nature >.<

WordPress has just released their new version. There are some interesting changes with Atom feeds, widgets, some import features and of course bug fixes and speed optimizations. From a personal standpoint I’m only really interested in the latter of the list, but seeing as how upgrades are a complete breeze! I wish tags made it into this release, but I suppose waiting for 2.2.x or 2.3 won’t be so bad.

NginX has come out with a new version, 0.5.20. There were enough changes over the last few versions to definitely warrant an upgrade, which took an overly complicated minute /sarcasm. It probably would have taken less time if I could not make typo’s XD

I can’t really argue with this, nginx, mysql, php-cgi:

@redvps:/usr/local/nginx/sbin$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 254 233 21 0 36 68
-/+ buffers/cache: 127 126
Swap: 511 4 507


Yep, I went there.

- New/change theme.
- Upgrade web server to the, once again, new NginX 0.5.19.
- Figure out clean URL’s, no more reading examples, just going to emulate .htaccess WP generates 100%.
- Celebrate how more then a month down the line I still love my slice.

That’s all, for now.

Rebuilding one of my server machines that also acts as a server where I work today, I jumped over to the newly released Ubuntu 7.04 on the virtue that I didn’t have a DVD drive around and the task of switching CD’s for also the newly released CentOS 5 seemed “daunting”.

One of the first things that’s different is no SSH server by default. This however is easily remedied on Ubuntu and all you need to do is follow the following steps to have SSH access to your brand new Ubuntu/Debian server.

# sudo -s
# apt-get install openssh-server

This will install the actual server and create the basic configuration files. You’re close to being done!

I don’t like to leave SSH on the default port, or allow root logins, instead relying on sudo from local accounts, so:

# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Change the port variable to some number >1024, for example ‘Port 12345′.
Change the PermitRootLogin variable to no, for example ‘PermitRootLogin no’.

Now just restart the SSH server to read in the new config.

# /etc/init.d/ssh restart

You should now be able to connect to your server with any SSH client on the specified port and login using any of the local users available on the machine.

Even though I’m still running release 0.5.16, there haven’t really been any changes that would significantly influence me to rush the upgrade, it is nice to see that release 0.5.18 is out. For completeness sake here’s the changelog:

Feature: the ngx_http_sub_filter_module.
Feature: the “$upstream_http_…” variables.
Feature: now the $upstream_status and $upstream_response_time variables keep data about all upstreams before X-Accel-Redirect (These are actually pretty cool, and will give you more data on what exactly the times are after NginX passes off the work )

Bugfix: a segmentation fault occurred in master process after first reconfiguration and receiving any signal if nginx was built with ngx_http_perl_module and perl did not support multiplicity; bug appeared in 0.5.9.
Bugfix: if perl did not support multiplicity, then after reconfiguration perl code did not work; bug appeared in 0.3.38.

After a hiatus caused partially by my lack of love for the Grid-Server, *tisk tisk, glare*, it’s back, it needs to have this theme ripped apart and rebuilt and it’s now on WordPress until I learn enough to figure out more aggressive caching with Ruby. I have a lot of things I’d like to write a small how-to about, things that I picked up on while setting up my new VPS at SliceHost, who have by the way so far been superbly awesome.