Computers

Remote system logging with syslog-ng

June 16, 2009 in Unix

Remote system logging has many advantages. If you’re running multiple servers it can be difficult to keep track of all the log files, or pinpoint a problem when one crops up. Read more…

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Learning Outcomes: Compiling Shibboleth-2.1 on FreeBSD 7.0 From Source

January 16, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Unix

Shibboleth is a Internet2 single sign-on initiative. We were looking into using it to provide authentication services for some of our campus users. Unfortunately they don’t officially support the FreeBSD platform (only Cent-OS and RedHat). They do however provide instructions for compiling the software from source. The first thing you need to do is start compiling the multiple dependencies that Shibboleth will require.

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FreeBSD, APC and File locking = Kernel Panic?

November 13, 2008 in Unix

The other day we had ourselves a little scare. The server crashed: twice in the span of 24 hours. This was after being rock-solid stable for over 60 days. Luckily, we happen to be rock stars and found a fix…

Quick Solution:
If you don’t care about the details simply recompile your APC extension from source with a different “File locking” type. That should fix the problem.

Otherwise read on!

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Server Topology

September 30, 2008 in Unix

Our web-cluster at EMU Marketing is slightly unique, so I thought I would go over it a bit. We’re currently running three physical servers: a G4 PPC Xserve, an Xserve Xeon and a commodity server running FreeBSD 7.0. The Xserve Xeon is being used as a secure apache server (running mod_ssl) to handle HTTPS requests.

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Simple SSH port forward on Mac OS X Server

September 17, 2008 in Mac OS X

In the our office we’re hosting several jailed apache servers (FreeBSD) behind a Mac OS X server reverse-proxy (pound). Obviously this caused some access limitations to the jailed machines on the private network. To work around this we were able to port-forward ssh connections from the reverse proxy to specific jails. Unfortunately this was not well documented by Apple.

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Change OS X server hostname or ip address

August 13, 2008 in Mac OS X

I had to shuffle around a couple of our servers lately. If you’ve got a static ip address and your hostname changes this is the way to do it.

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Install OS X packages from the command line

August 13, 2008 in Mac OS X

I had to figure out how to do this recently, so here you go.

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Installing Apache/PHP/MySQL on Mac OS 10.4

August 13, 2008 in Mac OS X, Unix, Web Development

This post will cover compiling and installing Apache 2, MySQL Community Server 5.1 and PHP 5 from source on Mac OS X Server 10.4.

There are a number of pre-compiled LAMP packages for Mac OS X (one of my favorite being MAMP), if you’re in a hurry or don’t need a lot of custom configuring then I suggest you give one of those a shot.

It should be noted that OS X Server 10.4 comes with old versions of Apache 1.3, MySQL and PHP already installed. If you choose to roll your own install from source, you won’t be able to use Apple’s built in management console for the new software you just installed.