It is widely known that, if virtual hosts in Apache (httpd) are configured to permit vhost administrators override specific configuration options at the directory level using htaccess files, the web server consumes valuable time in order to check whether an htaccess file exists in every directory included in the requested path and parse it. On [...]

It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X [...]

This is a quick note that mod_wsgi daemon processes are now incompatible with mod_python. Upgraded mod_wsgi earlier today in CentOS and saw the following note. I guess this limitation has been around for a while before affecting CentOS/RHEL:

Permanently removing deleted posts and topics in bbPress can be cumbersome. bbPress does not provide a decent way to completely remove deleted content from the database. I am not sure why… In my case, these posts mostly contain spam and there is absolutely no reason to keep them in the database any more. As it [...]

The last incident with the php-cgi errors as a result of a bad PHP script made me re-evaluate the daily reports I receive from the server. I realized that a report about the httpd errors that have occured during the previous day, including all virtualhosts, is more important than I had initially thought. Such a [...]

This is just a quick notice that during the last five days there was a problem with the website feeds. The web server returned a 500 Internal Server Error to almost all requests for /feed/ URLs. Also, there was a big increase of the server’s CPU load behind the scenes, which was caused by php-cgi [...]

I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

setenforce is a command line utility that is used to switch the mode SELinux is running in from enforcing to permissive and vice versa without requiring a reboot. Lately, I’ve started experimenting again with SELinux on a live system. The default targeted SELinux policy, as usual, needs some adjustment to work with a custom server [...]

Usually, the only time I make a change to the timezone setting of the operating system is during the installation time. But it may happen that a change to that setting is necessary. There are several ways to do this, but, as usual, there is only one Right Way™ to set the timezone info in [...]

During the last months, I’ve been experimenting with Xen virtualization. An old computer, equipped with a Pentium III running at 700Mhz, 512MB of RAM and an 160GB IDE HDD runs four installations of my favorite Linux distribution, CentOS, one as a Dom0 and the other three as DomUs with 64MB of memory each.