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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

AddThis weird behaviors

I just switched my websites from one server to another and noticed that on my main company site (http://www.m2osw.com) I would get a # at the end of the URL. Automatically added somehow. Thinking that could be a bad guy I checked the code and could not really see anything.

Hitting "Back" once, I noticed that the # would be transformed to #atssh-digg. I don't have anything specific about digg on that page except the AddThis button. That adds Digg among some 150 different systems where you can share my pages.

Moving a website to a new server

Now and again, you have to move a website from one server to another.

There are good and bad things about that, the main problem is with dynamic websites. Why is that? Simple: a dynamic website expects to access a database and if you hit the wrong server, that will go bad.

What's the best solution?

1. Install your website on the new server, make sure it loads okay (you may want to use a test sub-domain name to make sure, although that's not a rock solid proof since some things may use a fully qualified URL)

2. Change the IP address in your ...

Name server IP address

Why is my nameserver IP address not changing?

If you have a domain that you use as a nameserver (instead of using your domain name provider name servers), then you will need to maintain the IP address of that nameserver.

You can (and should) define your nameserver IP address in your zone. This is fairly straight forward. Simply define the ns1, ns2, ns3, etc. as a regular address and also mark them as NS entries:

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Today, I noticed many entries in the log of my mail server with this error:

   warning: connect to 127.0.0.1:60000: Connection refused

   or

   warning: connect to 127.0.0.1:10023: Connection refused

The fact is that this does not tell you anything (duh!)

We use postfix which runs many servers and each server talks to the other via network messages. Up to here, nothing special. The problem is whenever a server cannot connect to another, instead of telling us who, what, when, it just tells us that the connection did not happen (although there is the date, but it does not tell you when in the chain of events.)

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Extremely slow pg_connect() call

Got to setup a new server and first got the firewall to where I wanted it to be:

Block everything except ssh, Apache, SMTP, a few other things, but really not much more than that.
Block everything with IPv6 since we don't use it.

Then I installed Apache and a couple of websites.

The first one finally started to work, but it was so very slow to show up. I checked the code, the database, nothing wrong... And the database is lightning fast! ( in comparison to our previous server that is.)

So I wondered and thought maybe that my Apache firewall is in the way. I turned it ...

A firewall inside Apache

If you are running a webserver, you should use a webserver firewall. This prevents many attacks from being perpetrated on to your servers without the need to make your own applications more complex than necessary.

The idea is very simple, if you have a few people who can edit your data from the Internet and those have a static IP address, you can check that the editor pages are only accessible to those IP addresses. Any other access can simply be blocked.

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Password Security

I suppose we could talk about security all day and only barely touch the tip of the iceberg, if even more than a spec of it.

Yet, I wanted to mention that in many instances, there are such limits to the characters you can use in a password that already the provider prevents you from creating a string password in the first place!

So... what is it I'm talking about?

I have one company I work with that does not support anything more than letters and digits. Not only that, they limit your password between 6 and 10 characters. Everyone knows that 6 characters is cracked very very quickly and

PNG Fix for IE 5.5 and 6.0

If you don't work on creating web pages, you are probably not much aware of the creativeness necessary to make them work in Internet Explorer 6.0 and older.

Today, I had to make PNG images work in IE 6.0 since one of my customers still has that version of the browser and his website has several PNG images that require to have a working alpha channel.

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Hide sub-folders with Subversion

It is often that I want to hide a sub-folder so whenever I do an svn status I don't actually see that sub-folder in my list of files that are not available in the repository. It is otherwise quite annoying to see that folder again and again.

The command to do so uses a property on the parent folder as follow:

Perforce under Windows

Each customer has a different tool and at times the same customer changes the tools they are using to a better one.

Here I now have to use Perforce. In general, it is fine, but this system is much more complicated to use than any other source control system I've used before. Does that make it better? It certainly makes me waste a lot more time!

For one thing, I have to use it under MS-Windows and that does not make it any simpler.

There are two ways to make use of the system: (1) with the GUI interface, which simply helps you with handling long lists and paths and offering most of ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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