Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 87

NFSv4 and UIDs on OpenSolaris and Ubuntu

NFS clients and servers negotiate to use the highest NFS version they both support. NFSv4 usually performs much better than NFSv3, but requires a little more setup. Here I get NFSv4 working between an OpenSolaris file server and a diskless Ubuntu client. In theory, a plain mount(8) gives us a NFSv4 mount.

# mount server:/data1/opennebula/on22 /mnt/

#

Use nfsstat -m to see what kind of mount they negotiated

# nfsstat -m
...
/mnt from server:/data1/opennebula/on22
Flags...

Book Giveaway Contest

I have two copies of Network Flow Analysis that need good homes, so I'm having a contest.

The last time I gave books away, I wasn't able to contact several people to give them their free book. If you enter, you MUST include a way for me to contact you. If you leave a link to a web page, the web page should say "Contact" somewhere on it.

The contest? In the comments below, suggest ways to give The Great Committer the honor and respect he deserves. The funnier, the better.

I will choose one...

Attending a Publishing Workshop

I'll be in Portland, Oregon, from July 9-17, attending two consecutive Dean Wesley Smith workshops.

Pitches, Blurbs, Tags, and PromotionsHow to Be a Publisher

DWS is a successful novelist who is doing quite well self-publishing. Of course, he has years of authorial experience and an existing audience, but he also built Pulphouse Publishing back in the 80s. I'm delighted for the chance to drain those decades of accumulated experience from his brain. If you have any interest in publishing...

awk and access.log

I keep forgetting about the single quotes in this incantation. Writing it down won't improve my memory, but I'll know where to look it up.

To see a field (e.g. referers) from Apache's combined access.log:

# cat /var/log/apache/logname | awk '($11 !~ /sitename|\-/) {print $11}'

This strips out references from the site itself, plus entries with a – in the field. Mostly useful when testing anti-referer-spam stuff.

mod_security2 and referer spam returns

I just upgraded my Web server's operating system and applications. As part of this, I upgraded to the latest mod_security rule set. I started with mod_security to block referer spam, but I'm also using it to block connections from blacklisted addresses. mod_security has a steep learning curve, and I've had to tweak my rules more than once.

With these upgrades, my anti-referer-spam rules stopped working. Incoming requests with referer spam headers were logging to my access log and showing up ...

WordPress LDAP auth on Ubuntu

I support too many servers and applications to manage separate user databases for each. LDAP is a must. If an application can't hook up to LDAP, I don't want it. WordPress can be configured to use LDAP, and has several different LDAP plugins. I've had mixed results with PHP LDAP plugins. I usually find that having the application trust Apache's authentication, and attaching Apache to LDAP, gives better results in my environment.

Note that my WordPress installations usually have only one o...

new personal Web site

Over the last fifteen years or so, hand-coded HTML has transformed from "how it is done" to "a baroque eccentricity" to "an amusing peccadillo" to "what is WRONG with you, dude?"

My personal Web site, http://www.michaelwlucas.com, has now been updated. It's as boring as ever, except for the awesome art. Let me know if you see any problems. Those of you who prefer the old version can see it at www-old, but I won't update it again.

Permalinks Updated

For an unrelated project, I learned how to make WordPress permalinks. I made that change on the blog this morning. My testing shows that they work, and that incoming links are redirected correctly.

If you should see a problem, please drop me a note.

New FreeBSD Installer test and walkthrough

For those who missed the announcement, FreeBSD 9 has replaced sysinstall with a new installer. It's based on the PC-BSD installer's back end and a text-based front end by Nathan Whitehorn. So, what is this new installer we've waited sixteen years for? I decided to find out.

As an official snapshot with the BSD installer isn't yet available, I grabbed one of nwhitehorn's recent snapshots. The back end is not integrated, but let's see what the front end looks like. I assume there will be...

[emerg] (13)Permission denied: couldn't grab the accept mutex

I installed Apache on a diskless FreeBSD-9/amd64 server. Once I added SSL, the web server wouldn't start. It died with:

[Mon Mar 21 15:37:16 2011] [emerg] (13)Permission denied: couldn't grab the accept mutex
[Mon Mar 21 15:37:16 2011] [emerg] (13)Permission denied: couldn't grab the accept mutex
[Mon Mar 21 15:37:16 2011] [emerg] (13)Permission denied: couldn't grab the accept mutex
[Mon Mar 21 15:37:16 2011] [emerg] (13)Permission denied: couldn't grab the accept mutex
[Mon Mar 21 15:37:16...