Archive for February 3rd, 2010

Installing drivers on Computer with Motherboard ASUS A7N8X-VM with chipset (NVIDIA Nforce IGP)

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Today an old friend of mine’s wife who owns a small Architecture company,
did call asking if I can reinstall two computers running for her.
I accepted and here I am reinstalling the systems.
The first one lacked drivers and it was a real pain in the ass.
The system was a computer with Motherboard ASUS A7N8X-VM, in order to
determine the Motherboard type and chipset. I used a free program called
aida32 the program provides the user with quite a concrete description
of the computer hardware and is quite similar to the so famous but non-free
Everest .
After I’ve figured out the system hardware with AIDA32 which was:

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-VMChipset: NVIDIA Nforce IGPLAN Driver: NVIDIA-MCP2-Lan-ControllerGraphics Adapter: ATI Radeon 9600Sound Blaster: NVidia Audio Codec
Next I encountered problems finding the right driver pack, It took me
like 50 minutes to figure out what kind of driver should I use to make the
LAN Driver: NVIDIA-MCP2-Lan-Controller working on the PC.
I’ve found that actually this NVIDIA-MCP2-Lan-Controller is actually the:
Realtek RTL8201BL and therefore I need drivers for Realtek RTL8201BL.
After some time looking for the Driver I came to a forum which discussed the
issue. The author has revealed that the drivers required for the ASUS A7N8X-VM
is included in NVIDIA nforce in 15.45_nforce_winxp32_international_whql.exe
file which is available via nvidia.com’s website .After installing this NVIDIA nforce pack all worked like a charm!.

Configuring varnishd to log client IP addresses in Apache log

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

I realized today, that because my varnish serves incoming connections to my
apache port a really annoying problem appears.
I mean in my httpd-access.log everytime I get some visit from the Net, the
incoming IP address logged in the Apache log is originating from 127.0.0.0
e.g. (localhost). That’s a real pain in the ass, cause it prevents me from
adequately tracking visitors countries and their networks.
Therefore to fix that and configure varnish to always log my original visitors
IPs to the apache log I had to follow instructions described in.
How can I log the client IP address on the backend? in the Varnish Cache FAQ

Here I will include step by step explanation how I practically implemented
the solution as explained in the FAQ on my FreeBSD.

First I had edit:
/usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl
The following is currently my default.vlc file content:
backend default {.host = "127.0.0.1";.port = "8080";}sub vcl_recv {# Add a unique header containing the client addressremove req.http.X-Forwarded-For;set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;# [...]}
Next I had to add:
varnishd_config="/usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl"
to my /etc/rc.conf
And then modify my:
/usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
and include:
LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i"" varnishcombined
as well as:
CustomLog /var/log/httpd-access.log varnishcombined
to all my VirtualHosts.

Finally it’s required to restart both varnishd and apache
pcfreak# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/varnishd restartpcfreak# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart

That’s all folks!