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How the hell did I compile that again?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 10, 2008
in Hosting, Internet, Techno-Babble and Work
. 0 Comments

I was stuck re-compiling Apache today to enable support for mod_proxy so I could pass requests through our existing webserver seamlessly to our new PHP5-sporting webserver. Of course I decided to make some other “optimizations” along the way with our Apache configuration, so I ended up breaking everything.

Recompiling Apache threaded of course required that I recompile PHP so it had thread support, and recompiling PHP meant I had to re-tackle the problem of Oracle support in PHP which has always been quite shady anyway.

To make a long story short, one of the things I needed to know was which parameters to pass into each ./configure command. PHP’s handy-dandy phpinfo(); page shows you the configure command used, but I didn’t know off hand how to find out which parameters Apache had been built with.

After poking around in the Apache root directory, I found my answer. Apparently the Apache configure command saves a pretty format of itself every time it’s compiled. On our box at work, I found it in <server_root>/build/config.nice - I presume it’s in a similar location for everyone.

For anyone wondering, yes, I did get mod_proxy up and running, and everything works like a charm. I’ll probably toss together another quick entry tomorrow about our specific use case, since I had to piece together all the information I found from dozens of different sites, none of which seemed to have the whole picture.

In the mean time, happy compiling!

Welcome to the Slice!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 8, 2008
in Announcements
. 0 Comments

If you’re reading this, you’ve made the transition to the slice-based Babble. Hurray, rejoice, etc.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Screenshots

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 5, 2008
in Announcements, Beta Testing, Commentary, Cool, Geek Toys, Internet, Microsoft, Reviews and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

I threw together some screenshots and comments on Flickr while I was quickly giving IE 8 a run through tonight, if anyone’s interested.

IE 8 Beta 1 gallery

Desktop Icon

Can You Spot the Downtime?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 5, 2008
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Hosting, Humor, Internet, Networking and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments
Can You Spot the Downtime?

Testing the Slice

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 4, 2008
in Hosting, Internet, Public Opinion, Questions, Techno-Babble and Wordpress
. 1 Comment

I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now1, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.

Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache2 and PHP, I was good to go.

The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.

The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.

The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.

All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement3.

I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.

If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.

One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon4, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.

So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…

  1. About 6 months, but don’t tell anyone. [back]
  2. I never expected it to be that different than other distros. [back]
  3. Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme. [back]
  4. I use their massive storage for backups as well. [back]