HostingGeek

I am a geek. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. I am a very big geek.

I run servers for a living, but mainly I don’t get to play with them. I get to configure them and fix them when they break, but generally… I just get them to work and make sure they keep working, I never get to play.

That is where my home server closet comes in. My home server closet is my playground. I get to play with things, test out new software, basically break things and have fun in the process. My server closet at home helps me do that.

It really is a closet, a small walk-in closet 4 foot by 3 foot, with a bakers rack full of computer equipment, monitors, keyboards, cables, and the like. There are servers in there too. Three of them actually.

Server 1 is my media server (pragmatic). This server handles streaming duties, video from an onboard tv tuner (mythtv) as well as some streaming mp3s (icecast).

Server 2 is my development server and general all around do boy (tragic). This server handles samba (windows based file sharing), tinydns (dns for the internal network), dnscache (to handle dns requests to the clients in the local network), apache2, PHP4, PHP5, SVN, etc…

Server 3 is my phone system server (magic). This server handles only one thing, my phone lines. It serves as a media gateway allowing me to connect POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines to VoIP services like Voneage (which I don’t use, but there are others out there like them, just not as popular). The software that handles this is called Asterisk, and by all accounts it is a pretty amazing piece of open source software made by a company called Digium. The software itself is free, but Digium makes their money off the hardware, and considering how good the software is… I am inclined to throw money their way as often as I can.

Anyways…

Server 3… “Magic” has been the bane of my existence since I put it into service about a year and half ago. It isn’t so much that the hardware is bad, but rather the hardware in relation to the environment it was in. Magic has always had an IBM Ultrastar 9GB drive since the day I built it. 10K RPM of SCSI lovin. It is fast… really fast… and pretty reliable… only one or two problems. It is HOT and LOUD. Really loud.

So enters the paradox that is the server closet. The server is loud, as such, I don’t want the noise in my home office, so I close the door. Enter the other problem, heat. As I close the door to the closet, temperatures in the server closet climb to insane levels. So then I have to open the door to let the heat out. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

So finally today… the heat was unbearable… and was starting to effect the PBX cards in the machine. So I decided to see why. Turns out the PSU fan died, and the computer was just roasting inside. So I pulled it out to replace the PSU and decided that I wanted to remove the noisy SCSI drive. So I start looking around for my Ghost disks… Long story short… no matter what I tried Ghost refused to see the SCSI drive.

Enter my savior: I have had a copy of Ultimate Boot CD for a couple of years now. So after blowing a couple of hours with Ghost. I figured what the heck. I threw it in, did a little g4l (Ghost 4 Linux) diskcopy sc0 wd0 mojo and it did its thing. I rebooted fully expecting it not to work… but much to my surprise, it worked flawlessly. Just a couple of adjustments to the grub loader to allow it to boot from the IDE drive instead of the SCSI drive and I was in business.

So now… I am basking in the quiet and reduced heat levels in my server closet. Life is good, and geek points restored.

I have used mod_rewrite to great extent in the past with great success. It is great to handle search engine friendly urls. This article won’t be covering how to do that sort of thing as that has been beat to death, rather this article will show you some of the quirks of using mod_rewrite with apache and apache’s different configuration options.

I have used mod_rewrite a great deal and I consider myself to be well versed in how to set it up and use it. That being said, I learned a couple of little quirks about using it in the apache config file and how these might surprise you.

Prior to today I have always used mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file. I feel safe in saying that 100% of my usage of mod_rewrite to date has been via .htaccess. So today when mod_rewrite wasn’t working I tried to use my normal methods of debugging and was stumped as to why it wasn’t working.

First off a little background: We were running mod_rewrite from within the httpd.conf file. Further more we were actually calling RewriteEngine On from inside a virtualhost apache directive. In the past people have told me this is a faster way of using mod_rewrite so we decided to use it as this was a some what speed sensative server. What I discovered is that running mod_rewrite within this directive changes the way mod_rewrite directives work.

Previously when using mod_rewrite via .htaccess I was always able to turn on logging using the directives in the “root” level of the httpd.conf file:

RewriteLog “/var/log/apache/modrewrite.log”
RewriteLogLevel 10

Lesson 1 learned: This works great if you are running mod_rewrite from a .htaccess, however it has zero effect if you are running mod_rewrite from inside a virtualhost directive. For this to work properly in the virtualhost you must place the RewriteLog directives inside the virtualhost directive where you are using RewriteEngine On. Good to know…

Once I turned on the logging I was able to determine that my regex pattern matching for mod_rewrite was missing my target.

Lesson 2 learned: When you are running mod_rewrite in virtualhost you can not use RewriteBase. This means you must manually correct for this in your regex to match the leading / and the trailing / match.

Hopefully those will help out others who aren’t getting the results the expect.

And now for those of you that have made it this far down, here are some fun things you can do with mod_rewrite.

Have all files that don’t have an extension be passed to the PHP parsing engine. This is particularly usefuly for creating scripts that look like directories. So you have http://somedomain.com/foobar/action/1/name/smith/ and first part of the url (foobar) is actually a PHP script that the rest of the url gets passed to. Sneaky huh? Here it is:

ForceType application/x-httpd-php

I hope this posting helps others in using the powerful apache module mod_rewrite and maybe prevent some lost hairs in the process.

How is it possible that people who are running an online company don’t have a clue when it comes to technology?

Case in point today: I was handed a project to take care of for a client. They want me to take input from a form, validate it, store it in a local database and then create a CSV file and send that via FTP to a remote server. Not a difficult request, but also not a terribly secure one either. So I decided I would call the company that was supposed to be getting the CSV via FTP and see if I could just POST the data to a web form instead. So I called them…

Me: “Yeah, hi. This is so and so from company and I was wondering if you guys had a web form that I could send this CSV/FTP data to instead of the CSV/FTP method.”

Other Guy: [:long pause:] “Uhm… I have no idea what you are talking about. The CTO is out of town and won’t be back until tomorrow. Let me ask [so and so].”

Me [now with so and so on the phone listening]: “Yeah I would like to just send this via curl data post.”

At this point I could tell that the loud sucking sound coming from the other end of the line wasn’t a good sound. So I tried to explain myself further.

Me: “You know… An online form… Where you type stuff into it, and it saves it some place… like a database… and then you guys can create your CSV from that instead. It would save me a lot of time.”

Other Guy again: “Well this plan has been laid out for two weeks and it is supposed to go live tomorrow. Don’t you think it is a little late in the game to change things?”

At this point I was annoyed… Here I am two hours into this project, and he is talking down to me like I had been there through out the entire thing?!? WTF?

Me: “You know you are certainly right _IF_ I had been involved at that point. And I wasn’t. So… getting back to my question, can you do it?”

Other Guy: “Well we would have to get the CTO involved.”

You have got to be f*cking kidding me. You need the CTO to tell you how to make a web form? And you people run a web based business?!?!

At his point I decided to cut my losses.

Me: “Okay I will create the CSV and FTP the file. I will need the FTP information as well as the CSV format.”

Other Guy: “Well we have already sent that to Bob.”

Me: [leaning over to Bob] “Did you get that CSV formatting and FTP info from ComapnyB?”

Bob: “Nope they never sent it.”

Me: “He says you never sent it. So please send it so that I can continue my work.”

That was 3 hours ago. I am still waiting for the CSV file.

Its no wonder the dotcom bubble burst. If any of the companies Were run this way its a miracle they survived.

I admit that I have been remiss about updating my blog. I have been assisting (in any small way that I can) to help in the hurricane relief by providing support to some companies that desperately need some assistance.

In the meantime, here is an image that I created in Photoshop for an upcoming project. Obviously the MSN “blue guy” is my influence as well as some of the images from foood.net.

If there is some interest in how to create something like this, please let me know and I will work up a tutorial for doing it.