FreeBSD

Coding Open – The Benefits of Free and Open-Source Software in Academia

September 4, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Web Development

The term “open-source software” means many things to many people. To some, it’s a method of collaboration; an easy way for your work to benefit your peers. Others see it as a confusing business paradigm. After all, how can you make money by giving away your work? Still others see it as an affordable way to launch a business; or teach yourself a new skill. Clearly open-source software has many uses. But like anything, it’s important to understand both the benefits and the drawbacks to going open-source. Specifically in an academic setting.

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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.