Machina improba

Open-Source

Perl dependencies I'll never understand

Posted Tue, 08/19/2008 - 9:45am by rernst

Why does the URI::Escape module require Business::ISBN?

Anybody?

Kubuntu 8.04 ('Hardy Heron')

Posted Tue, 07/29/2008 - 5:45pm by rernst

Followers of my blog may have wondered -- around the end of April -- why I never made any comments about 8.04 / 'Hardy Heron'. There are two reasons for that. The first was: It was really really bad. I'm not enough of a zealot to gloss over that and ignore it: I'll speak my mind even on things I've traditionally endorsed, and it was a load of crap. Why? KDE4. That brings me to the second reason I did not post about it: upgrading my main workstation was such a disaster, I didn't have the time to blog about it.

Drupal Security Updates - 5.8 / 6.3 and OpenID module 5.x-1.2

Posted Thu, 07/10/2008 - 8:19am by rernst

This morning I received notice of two security update releases in my inbox: one about Drupal core being upgraded, another about the OpenID module containing a security vulnerability before 1.2.

Since upgrading Drupal core is such a pain, I've generated a patch (it's attached to this post: click on '1 attachment' to retrieve it) for upgrading your existing sites from 5.7. If you're not running a 5.7 site, please don't try to use it.

Microsoft's Biggest 'Threat'

Posted Fri, 05/30/2008 - 2:15pm by rernst

Microsoft periodically shuffles around what it thinks to be its biggest 'threat'. Right now, it's apparently open source. Yesterday, it was Google.

I disagree. Microsoft's biggest threat is itself. Particularly the higher-ups (here's looking at you, Steve...) for their refusal to embrace the open source community, rather than spouting FUD and lies.

Efficient Rotating Daily backups with rsync

Posted Thu, 04/24/2008 - 5:06am by rernst

Systems administrators typically use the date command in combination with cp -R to provide backup functionality. In a cronjob, the command


cp -R /path/to/backup /backup/destination/backup-`date +%u`

So what will this do? It will create seven distinct directories, one for each day of the week (1 through 7). When overwriting your old backups, you can either delete them first, or set cp to overwrite them. Neither is really optional.

Building on Drupal to Reduce Costs

Posted Thu, 04/10/2008 - 5:32am by rernst

Building upon Drupal because it's 'cheaper' is a very poor reason to build on Drupal. It may be cheaper in the end than hacking up some closed-source commercial CMS to include the functionality that Drupal provides in its core distribution. But there's at least one thing to keep in mind:

Three Basic Steps to Optimizing Drupal

Posted Thu, 04/03/2008 - 12:40pm by rernst

There are a few simple steps you can take to optimize Drupal. Drupal is a large, heavy system: every advantage counts.

This initial benchmark is taken without any of the variables which I'm going to test: css aggregation, mod_deflate, and apc.


ab -n100 http://drupal.shadowlife.ca/drupal-5.7/


Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0
Processing: 24 40 20.4 31 123
Waiting: 21 34 17.2 28 119
Total: 24 40 20.4 31 123

End of Year warnings, recapped

Posted Sat, 12/15/2007 - 6:15am by rernst

Last July, it was announced that PHP 4 had been end-of-life'd.

What this means is that there won't be any more bugfixes, and only critical security vulnerabilities will be released for some months into 2008. Most web hosts do have PHP 5 available, but a few shared hosting providers haven't done so.

http://www.gophp5.org has more information on what web applications claim to be compatible, but I disagree with:

Oracle’s latest cloning effort

Posted Sat, 11/17/2007 - 6:16am by rernst

A while back, Oracle cloned Red Hat Enterprise Linux as Unbreakable Linux (now 'Oracle Enterprise Linux'). It offered nothing new over REHL (or for that matter, CentOS), and the only difference was the support price. Needless to say, Oracle Enterprise Linux hasn't been a stellar success.

Freebie Magazines Online

Posted Sat, 11/10/2007 - 9:09am by rernst

Several Linux-centric print magazines have their back issues available on the web. In most cases, the freely-available ones are several months old, but if you can deal with that it's a cheap way to get the content.

So far, there are two that I'm aware of:

Plus one that *used* to have back issues online, but still offers a digital subscription service: Linux Pro Magazine (aka 'Linux Magazine' in Europe)

For those interested, Linux Journal also is currently offering a free issue download.

There are a number of online-only 'magazines' that have sprung up in the past year. The trend seems to be towards a format reminiscent of a blog, but with content published in large chunks. Of these, my favorite is Free Software Magazine which is up to issue 20 now.

Edit: fixed typo