Who Coined iPhoneography

December 6, 2011

This post has absolutely nothing to do with who coined the term, iphoneography. But it’s pretty hilarious finding out this site came up as a Google search result for that term. Moving along to what this post is really about.

You Found Me How
I don’t recall the last time I looked at my site stats. More specifically, the keywords that people use to find my site. After reading yet another funny post by Patti on how people found her, I figured I would write up a similar post. Unfortunately, I can’t produce anything as funny as “blind girl eyes”, “can hives look like scabies”, or “cheboygan chicken joe”. My Eureka! moment came after scrolling past 189 lines of networking, server, and web programming related terms. I found my first jewel at line 190.

#epicfail with SELinux and Remi Repository

January 12, 2011

Earlier I’ve been working on an enterprise application running on Drupal. One of the modules required that I update to a PHP 5.2. The server I am using is CentOS release 5.5. Typically, on all my servers I run Ubuntu 10.04 (latest version is 10.10), and I have no issues when it comes to updating any of the packages. CentOS, on the other hand, works in a completely different way. The latest PHP package in their repository is 5.0 or 5.1, and its updates aren’t as frequent as other releases. Ubuntu updates its repositories on a continuous basis, and checks to make sure that certain software packages work with their system before releasing it to the public for download.

My hurdle to get PHP updated with CentOS is to switch to a different repository. I began by installing remi and epel which are up to date.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Once this was installed, I simply had to update PHP, right?

Catchin the Bad Guys

November 24, 2010

Looking through the Apache log file can show you some interesting stuff. In the process, I almost managed to block Google’s crawler.

Taking a deeper look in Apache’s logs.

Setting up an IP Tables Firewall in Linux

July 22, 2010

Over the past couple years, I found myself spending more time with Linux servers. I generally work with Ubuntu servers but more recently began swimming in the yum’s and rpm’s of CentOS. Although each server requires specific configurations and fine tuning, my general starting point after creating a user account was setting up a firewall.

There are various software firewalls available for each distribution. The one I’ve used most is IP Tables, and setting up is relatively straight forward.

Start by viewing your current configuration (if available)

sudo iptables -L

This command will allow you to view the current set of rules that exist. To start on a clean slate, I would recommend saving all your rules to a file. Let’s start by flushing the existing rules.

sudo iptables -F

Getting Apache 2 and Tomcat 6 to Collaborate on a Ubuntu 10 server

July 20, 2010

If there is any topic I have researched till the point of further hair loss, it is getting an Apache web server to collaborate with Tomcat easily, on a Ubuntu system. In fact, I think collaborate may not be the right term, but a more proper description would be having Apache delegate certain tasks to Tomcat. Essentially, Tomcat would handle the access to the Java applications, while Apache would take care of everything else.

There are alot of articles, blog posts, and how-to’s that take this topic into depth. Most of them are either out-dated, or haven’t quite worked with my present scenario.