Need to perform lookups on Open Directory from Linux? Need to determine a search base to use an LDAP plug-in for a third party with Active Directory? Determining the layout of a directory service can be important for a number of tasks. Most of these have to do with connecting systems of different platforms with one another. In OS X, there are a number of tools that will look up directory service information. Most are based on ldapsearch. Using ldapsearch, you can determine whether a search base is good, whether a directory service responds to a given request and validate some assumptions you may have about an LDAP environment. Let’s…
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Apache2 & umasks
I’ve been noticing more and more people using Apache as a way of getting files to and from servers. Call me silly but I think we’re going to continue to see more and more of this. A really common issue that comes up with Apache2 is default permissions of new files. Mac OS X is great with ACLs and whatnot. But Apache is built for posix. Posix is built on the foundation that the permissions of new files that are created come from umask. If you have a script that uploads a file then you can set the permissions as part of the script. But if you just pull it…
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Server Admin on Linux
Apple recently announced the end of the Apple Xserve. The data center is a funny thing, and being such rack space is critical to most who spend a lot of time there. Many of the previous Xserve customers will continue to buy Mac Pro’s and use them in racks as tall Xserves. Others will purchase Mac Mini’s and use them for certain situations. But many will move on to using the same iron in the data center that they use for everything else, finding a way to duplicate or replace the functionality that was previously in the Xserve with something else. Server Admin is not going to run on Linux.…
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Viral Marketing
Is it possible that a client can build a Facebook app, deploy it and not tell anyone, yet get so much traffic on the app that we have to add a second server within 6 hours? Yes. Is it then possible to quickly prop up an Apache cluster, forklift the data in there, throw together a quick MySQL cluster and be off to the races within 4 more hours while the end users of the app are complaining? Yes. Why, because there’s money in it. And where there’s money there’s will. And where there’s will there’s a way!
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Mac OS X: MAMP, Apache for the Masses
There’s a nifty little app called MAMP. It allows you to distribute what amounts to a self-containing web based application. Using MAMP you can install whatever you need in Apache and SQL and then zip it up and distribute it. Ports can be customized so as not to adversely effect the system’s other Apache instances that may be running. For example, Moodle…
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Mac OS X Server: php.ini
A customer recently called asking us to expand the timeout variable for downloading files via PHP from their server. By default the php.ini file does not exist in Mac OS X Server. If you need to use php.ini to granularly configure the parameters for PHP then you should download it from php.net by downloading the source code for PHP for the version that comes up when you run php -v from your server. In the tarball there will be a file called php.ini-recommended. Then copy this file to /etc/php.ini and modify the appropriate settings: upload_max_filesize = whatever you want the new maximum to be posters.max_execution_time = 30 max_input_time = 60 post_max_size…
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Mac OS X: MAMP
MAMP provides a portable LAMP-style environment for the Mac. Easy to move stuff around, easy to use MySQL and Apache. And can take your Apache 1.x environment in Tiger to an Apache 2.x environment.
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Installing Joomla! on Mac OS X Server
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal 1. Enable MySQL. 2. Create a database in MySQL called joomladb. 3. Create a new user called jadmin that has full priviledges to this database (the user does not need to be called jadmin, but that is the username we will be using for this walkthrough). 4. Download the latest stable release of Joomla. 5. Extract the tar files into a new folder (for this example we are going to call it joomla to keep things easy). 6. Make the following folders writeable for Joomla administrator/backups/ administrator/components/ administrator/modules/ administrator/templates/ cache/ components/ images/ images/banners/ images/stories/ language/ mambots/ mambots/content/ mambots/editors/ mambots/editors-xtd/ mambots/search/ media/ modules/ templates/ 7.…
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WAF: Web Application Firewall
Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs, are firewalls for web application. They monitor web traffic and decide whether to allow or deny specific requests. IIS web servers (OWA), Apache, WebObjects, Lasso and other web servers will likely end up working with them, although I’ve only tested IIS and Apache at this point.
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Web Metrics
The key to getting good performance is metrics. You need to measure every aspect of a system as it’s running to determine where the problems are and to prioritize where to expend optimization effort. Particular metrics of interest are: Queue sizes Queue rates # of clients (by IP and by connection count) # of pending requests average response rate throughput