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 am afraid the deployment of Redmine on CodeTRAX.org will be delayed some more. This is because I am skeptical about using mod_fcgid to run two different kinds of web applications on the same web server. This software is pretty much incomplete when it comes to defining classes of applications and setting limits, like the [...]

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 [...]

End of era for my Fedora based server after almost five years of service. The box now runs CentOS. I had this box at home and it was the only Fedora Server I ever maintained at home or elsewhere. I should state from the beginning that it was only Fedora’s short life-cycle that practically forced [...]

CentOS 5.3 for the i386 and x86_64 architectures has been released today. I usually do not reproduce such announcements, but this CentOS release is somehow special to me.

I’ve been using the mod_dav_svn module for Apache, part of the subversion distribution package, in order to make several SVN repositories available over the HTTP protocol for quite some time now. More specifically, I use a multi-repository setup under the same virtualhost by using the SVNParentPath directive of mod_dav_svn. Also, the authorization policy is enforced [...]

I’ve used the phrase “writable by the webserver” numerous times throughout this blog, without ever bothering to explain in detail what this means. Yesterday, I received an email asking me exactly that, so I decided to finally write a post about it and use it as a reference whenever I use the aforementioned phrase. I’ll [...]

This small HOWTO describes how to configure vsftpd for an anonymous FTP site in order to make files available across your local network or the internet. The scenario this guide is based on is to quickly make a linux distribution’s installation tree available across the local network in order to be used for a network [...]

Today I noticed that AWStats, the web traffic analysis tool, had stopped generating valid reports since November 23. After spending about 3 whole hours trying to figure out what on earth had happened and having checked all the things that could have gone wrong, I went through all the automatic emails my server had sent [...]