The Linux Page

SSH authorized_keys features

Pretty much every day I learn something... Today it will be the fact that you can enter variables in front of a key that will request the SSH deamon to verify a certain number of facts in regard to the connection being made.

For instance, it can automatically test that the IP address of the person connecting is a specific IP (if you have a static IP address, very practical!)

PostgreSQL and UNICODE

Internationalization

Trying to create a PostgreSQL Database with UNICODE does not always work. I ran in a problem with a RedHat installation...

There can be two problems:

  1. The default database setup is ASCII (more or less considered ISO-8859-1)
  2. The database cluster was compiled without UNICODE support

Now a day, the second case is quite unlikely and it means that you won't  be able to use a UNICODE encoding unless you recompile the database system. Make sure you use the ./configure --multi-byte encoding for that purpose.

In the first case, however, it could be that your cluster ...

PHP CLI Segmentation Fault with pgsql

Somehow, whenever I tried PHP CLI, it would crash because of PostgreSQL. (i.e. if I use the database in PHP through Apache, no problem, but the same script run via the command line, and it crashes on exit, no matter what I do with the resource handle.)

I was puzzled and did not really know what to do, but some people have found the solution. Now, what is really surprising is the fact that it has been around for ages and not yet fixed in the system.

The fact is, it does not matter too much as long as there is a work around, but you need to apply it yourself...

My customer cannot edit pages?!

I created a website and handed it to a customer... without realizing that the customer could not edit the pages of his site.

He reported the problem and I was rather surprised since I had not installed any module that would protect the editing of pages based on a role... what could it be? I checked the Drupal permissions a couple times... he had the right to edit all the nodes, his own and anyone else's, hmmm...

I looked at the code to try to figure it out, and there is a call to the filter module: filter_access($node->format).

Yes! Of course! I had forgotten to add his role to the ...

Compressed CSS & Boost when developing

On my sites, I'm using boost to allow much faster access time (close to instantaneous in comparison to hitting Drupal and all the database accesses...)

The result is great! But it generates some problems when you test a page. It does not get refreshed... Easy, you can clear the cache. Not advisable when your cache is around 10,000 files. A better way, is to go to that page and click on "Flush Page" (available in one of the blocks offered by boost.)

Load Average, to know how busy your server is

Whenever you run many applications on a server, such as many instances of your web server (i.e. Apache), you may want to know how much of the system is being used. This can be important to avoid overloading your system.

The load is computed by the kernel. The kernel knows how many processes are running and how much processing power your server has (i.e. how many processors.) With that information, it infers how many processes are being held back for a period of time. The default periods are 1, 5 and 15 minutes (I'm sure you can recompile your kernel with different timings!)

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MS-Access Report not printing

Reports, Print and Load() Event

I wrote many forms and in general everything works just fine.

In this case, I wanted to enter the data with a function so I could properly format several of the fields (especially the billing and shipping addresses.) That was done on the Load() event. That function working great when looking at the report from within MS-Access (on screen report). However, when directly sending the report to the printer, it was not working well at all.

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Alexis

Table owner in PostgreSQL

System tables and how to edit them is just not defined in the SQL language, unfortunately. So different database systems have different solutions to handle their table declarations. PostgreSQL is no different.

In most cases, MySQL uses some special instruction to update system information. In PostgreSQL, you have internal tables that the administrator can access and tweak as required.

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Alexis