If you don't much care about logging in logs from which domain / hostnames requests to webserver originate and you want to boost up the Apache Webserver performance a bit especially on a heavy loaded Websites, where no need for stuff like Webalizer, Awstats etc. , e.g. you're using GoogleAnalytics to already track requests (beware as sometimes GoogleAnalytics could be missing requests to your webserver, so having some kind of LogAnalyzer software on server is always a plus). But anyways accepting that many of us already trust GoogleAnalytitcs.
Then a great tuning option to use in default domain configuration or in multiple VirtualHosts config is:
HostnameLookups off
If you want to make the HostnameLookups off as a default behaviour to all your virtualhosts on Debian / Ubuntu / CentOS / SuSE / RHEL distro virtualhosts add either to default config /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default (on Deb based Linuxes) or (on RPM based ones), add directive to /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
For self-hosted websites (if run your own small hosting) or for a home situated webservers with up to 20-50 websites it is also a useful optimization tip to include in /etc/hosts file all the IPs of sites with respective domain names following the normal syntax of /etc/hosts, e.g. in my own /etc/hosts, I have stuff like:
pcfreak:~$ cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain 127.0.1.1 pcfreak.pc-freak.net pcfreak mail.pc-freak.net 192.168.0.14 new-pcfreak 219.22.88.70 fw 212.36.0.70 ftp.bg.debian.org 212.211.132.32 security.debian.org 83.228.93.76 pcfreak.biz pc-freak.net pc-freak.net # for wordpress plugins 216.58.209.3 gstatic.com 91.225.248.129 www.linkedin.com 74.50.119.198 www.blogtopsites.com 94.31.29.40 static.addtoany.com 216.58.209.202 fonts.googleapis.com 216.58.209.14 www.google-analytics.com 216.58.209.14 feeds.feedburner.com 93.184.220.241 wprp.zemanta.com 199.30.80.32 stumbleupon.com 156.154.168.17 stumbleupon.com 2.18.89.251 platform.linkedin.com # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts # … etc. put IPs and hostnames following above syntax
As you see from above commented section for wordpress plugins, I've included some common websites used by WordPress enabled plugins to prevent my own hosting server to query DNS server every time. The normal way the Linux / Unix works is it first checks in /etc/hosts and only if the hostname is not defined there then it queries the DNS caching server in my case this is a local DJBDNS cache server, however defining the hosts in /etc/hosts saves a lot of milisecons on every request and often if multiple hosts are defined could save (decrease site opening for end users) with seconds.
Reading Time: 2minutes I’m trying to learn some basic design this days as an attempt to fill my huge missing gap of knowledge in graphic processing. I’ve always been not too good with visual stuff and always been focused on the command line and console, however since some time design started being quite interesting thing to me and I found it quite handy and challenging to learn some basic designing.
I’m not really a Windows guy and thus my Photoshop skills are next to zero. Since The Gimp is the substitute for Photoshopfor Linux users and I had a task for one of the websites I’m developing to make some pictures for the website transparent, therefore I had to learn how to make pictures transparent with The Gimp After some reading online and some experimenting with GIMP it appeared to me it’s very easy to actually make pictures transparent with the GIMP. So I’ve come with a small article here on how to make image or a picture transparent with Gimp in simple steps in order to help people who are trying to achieve the same easy task:
1. Open Gimp and place your mouse cursor on the picture
Here, Press the 2nd or 3rd mouse button to show menu.
2. Select Layer -> Transperancy -> Alpha to Selection
In that menu select
Select Layer -> Transprerancy -> Alpha to Selection
3. Use Fuzzy Select Tool and select the picture background
4. From Gimp Window pane main menu choose the Clear option
Edit -> Clear (Delete)
That’s all now your picture background should be removed if some parts of the picture still needs to be purged just follow the above step and remove them. I should say I thought making picture transparent with GIMP would be a more complex task than it really was, quite nice one more step in my development as a designer 🙂
Reading Time: < 1minute Yesterday I spend a lot of time outside with Lily. We went to the fountain we watched film at home. The film was called”Wild Hogs” it was supposed to be a fun commedy (only supposed to be). This week is going to be a taugh one.We have to present a project at Marketing Research.
I have to write a 600 words resume about International Enterprice,also we have to make a presentation in Culture. Today in the morning i was on a Liturgy again. God’s grace ishere ! The week passed without serious server issues (Thanks God). Today I checked some logs of one of the serversand I observed oddities there. I checked the crontab and I realized it’s because of a crontab. The dumped databaseis a HUGE one 2.6G (bzipped).
I asked in irc.freenode.net#mysql, and the guys there pointed me to a similar issuewhich was supposed to be an MySQL bug when dumping large database. Since the dumping databases were of a type MyISAMI ofcourse could have used mysqlhotcopy.
But in the end the solution to the problem was removing “–opt” option fromthe backup opts of mysqldump and passing “–skip-opt” to it (I suspect this would slow the dumping process a lot).But I don’t care it is much better (a slow dumping), than hanging the whole Webserver and interrupting the site’s visibilityover the Internet.
Btw I started playing Quake 2, it’s cool but a little annoying there are too many tunnels and veryoften after I kill most of the bad guys I spend a lot of time searching for keys and stuff .. :).END—–
Reading Time: < 1minute There is not much to say, Recently I’m experiencing mix of spiritual and emotional fluctuations ups and downs.I feel so alone quite often. There are not many valuable people (considering my interests).Day by day I’m asking myself the question “Hey man , why are you studying HRQM this stupid secreatary stuff.”I’m confused quite a lot and in a state of a denial, or better to say I feel a kind of lost because I’m out of my confortzone .. The teachers here in the HRQM stream claim that when a man is frightened and out of his confort zone,then he is learning a lot. They might be true about that, I don’t know. At Friday we had that Business Ethics test.Before the test we watched the movie “The Wizard of Oz” a movie from the distant year 1939. Right after the class wasover I went home and laundered my clothes. Then we had a dinner. Today I woke up around 11:00, had my breakfastat around 13:00 and near 13:30 I went out for a walk. I went to the city center and walked around the river Netherlands Rijn.A little later I walked through the city center around the open market which was located right before The St. Eusibeus Chapel.I went through a waggon which sells bibles in different languages and tried to draw people back close to God andspoke for a while with one nice old man who said used to be a Christian for 40 years already.Then I went for shopping to the grocy stores Aldi and Albertheijn and went back “home” to Honigkamp… That’s mostlyhow my day passed … I should thank to God for still caring for me and providing me with all necessary for my daily living.Thanks Lord! END—–
Reading Time: 2minutes Yesterday and today we had Management Games and Theathre Games with Joop Vinke.At the management game we play a sort of Human Resources Management game. All the students are devided into groups and we play a simulator game. We had to manage a company. First we setup our 2 year goals and then we play the game on quarters (6 quarters). Every quarter we have to made some managerial decisions (invest money into different stuff, hire personnel, promote ppl etc.).
Basicly the company consists of 660 employees, there are 5 levels in the company starting from 1 where there is unqualified specialists and 5 which are the top management.
When we make our choices then all this data is inputed into a computer which gives us some feedback which helps us in taking the decisions for the next quarter. At the meantime Vinke organizes fun games to entertain us and make us feel comfortable with him and through this games he tries to show us basic concepts in business. The last two days I really enjoyed.
Today the game that impressed me the most was called
“The Werewolves from Wackedan”. Basicly it’s a strategic game with roles. In it you’ve got a bunch of ppl who play different roles, 3 of them are werewolves, others are citizens others are ppl who have special abilities to foresee who are the werewolves.
We had cards in front of us turned back to prevent others except us to see the cards. Some of the cards are citizens and ppl who belong to the citizens other 3 are werewolves.
Every night the werewolf kills a person (by selecting somebody from the crowd, when they sleep), because the werewolves are out at night when everybody sleeps. At the morning citizens awake and one of their friends is dead so they try to revenge by pointing someone to be killed (it may be a citizen again it may be a werewolf).
At the end only werewolves or citizens should servive 🙂 It was a big fun today to play this simple game. At the end of the day at 18:00 we had a session of the so called Theathre/Games. Theathre Games include different entertaining games which are designed to improve our communication skills and teach us to act like an actors plus they are pretty entertaining 🙂 That’s all thanks to God everything seems to run smoothly around my life. Except my health I’m still having some health issues although I can say I have an improvement I am not still healed and I still drink herbs.
At 20:00 I was out with Narf and we went to the fountain a little later Kimmo and Yavor joined us and we spend some time their. Well that’s most of the day at night I went to my grandma just to see how she is doing and now I write this post tomorrow the Management Game continues at 09:00. So probably after few minutes I’ll go for the night prayers and then I’ll go to sleep. END—–
Reading Time: < 1minute By accident, I’ve come across Towel.blinkenlight.nl! You might be wondering what is so special with it? 😉 Well some crazy guy seems to have recreated a whole Star Wars movie in ascii art!!! 😉
As I’m a great ascii fan I enjoy a lot, hope more people will take the time to watch the re-created Star Wars Movie in ASCII !. I’m eager to see if someone knows of any similar kind of movies, demos or all kind of stuff streamed via telnet 🙂
To give you an idea on what you will see by telnetting to towel.blinenlight.nl, here is a short chop video:
Reading Time: 3minutes As an administrator of few company email delivery servers, I always had to debug problems related to emails unable to drop in Yahoo’s Mail and Gmail default mail Inbox
In that reason I always need to take a close look on Email headers to try to isolate email issues. Most often the problems with messages unable to deliver in default in Inbox are with the 3 most popular mail services:
Gmail
Live Hotmail
Yahoo
Thus I decided to explain shortly here how one can check full email headers in Gmail and Yahoo public mail services in order to be able to later derive conclusions on what is wrong with his mail server outgoing messages.
1. How to view full email headers in Gmail
It’s pretty easy, though for some reason Google decided to place the button which shows the complete email message headers in a I would say not too user friendly location.
To view email headers, login to Gmail, click over some random email in Inbox or some of the other mail folders. Once you can read the email and you see the Reply button located on the right,next to the Reply button there is the down triangle which while pressed will display a menu.
To view the full email headers one has to press over the Show original button presented in the menu. Below you see a sample screenshot on the menu with the Show Original button.
Show complete e-mail message headers and content in Gmail
2. How to view full email headers in Yahoo Mail Classic
I use Yahoo Mail Classic, as I like old stuff, Checking the full email headers there is a bit more intuitive than with Gmail.
To check email headers, just login to Yahoo mail, click over inbox, select an email message you would like to review as text. Further on after the end of the email, you will see the Delete, Reply, Forward, Spam and Move buttons, right below this field of buttons there is the Full Headers blue text link with very small letters.
Here is a screenshot I’ve made of a sample opened mail. On the screenshot in right bottom you see the blue Full Headers button.
Yahoo Mail Cassic View Email Full Header
3. How to view full mail headers in Hotmail
In Hotmail checking the email, headers’s button position is very similar to Gmail’s, the only difference is the exact button which shows the Full Email header is named View Message source
In order to check Email headers in Hotmail, one has to click over a desired message, click once again on the down triangle near the Reply button and press over View Message source
Here is a screenshot showing the View Message source menu Hotmail View Full email Headers
One small note to make here is that the View source headers buttons is currently not working on Epiphany browser running on Linux. As always Microsoft are making stuff incompatible, if it’s not used with a Microsoft product ..
Reading Time: 3minutes Since I upgraded to the latest Debian unstable I was forced to switch from the good old ipw3945 wireless driver to the newer one with which I had a bunch of unpleasent experienced, that was a good reason for me to kept myself back to the ipw3945. Anyways all my attempts to port the already 2 years old ipw3945 without a development to my 2.6.30-1-amd64 left void.Therefore I had to unwillingly switch to the iwl3945 driver. To do so I had to: 1. edit /etc/modprobe.d/00local.conf and remove the line
install iwl3945 /bin/true
2. edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment the line
blacklist iwl3945
3. edit /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945.conf and comment out install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install ipw3945 ; sleep 2 ; /sbin/ipw3945d –quiet remove ipw3945 /etc/init.d/ipw3945d modprobe-stop && modprobe -r –ignore-remove ipw3945 4. edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and comment out SUBSYSTEM==â€netâ€, DRIVERS==â€ipw3945″, ATTR{address}==â€00:1c:bf:bd:24:59″, ATTR{type}==â€1″, NAME=â€wlan0″SUBSYSTEM==â€netâ€, ACTION==â€addâ€, DRIVERS==â€?*â€, ATTR{address}==â€00:1c:bf:bd:24:59″, ATTR{type}==â€1″, KERNEL==â€wlan*â€, NAME=â€wlan0″ 5. Last but not least: rmmod iwl3945; modprobe iwl3945;
That so far was required to switch from ipw3945 to iwl3945.
Unfortunately after the switch I was pretty unhappy of the behaviour of the iwl3945 driver. Like for example the driver won’t detect many of the wireless networks during scan compared to the one detected by the old ipw3945 driver. I googled and found in Google many contradictions considering which driver (ipw3945 or iwl3945) prooves to be better. Some praised ipw3945 and tended to hold unto it while others were proclaiming that iwl3945 works in a much better manner. Again some Googling and thinking over the created problem led me to a website which suggsted a helpful tip on how to intialize the iwl3945 driver. That tip IMPROVED A LOT! the scanning behaviour of the iwl3945 driver. Here is the tip itself: Edit /etc/modprobe.d/iwl3945.conf and add to it the following: alias wlan0 iwl3945# the line below disables iwl3945 wireless driver hardware scanningoptions iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1# extend the network channels detected to 13options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU
After all is done the only left thing is to: reload the iwl3945 driver rmmod iwl3945modprobe iwl3945 And Hooray! It works Again! You will notice now much more networks are being detected and apart from that scanning returns results every time you scan for wireless networks To conclude the post I’ll say a few words on the line: options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU as well as explain briefly about wicdMany of you would wonder what is that about, well it’s about that on how many channels would wireless networks be detected. For example in the European Union wireless networks could be configured to work on channels up to 13, just to compare in the USA less channels are available thus the default behaviour of the iwl3945 driver is not to detect wireless networks on channels above 10 (I believe?). The above example communicates to the cfg80211 kernel module that more wireless channels are available since we’re in the EU (European Union). For kernels below version 2.6.24 you might need to use the variable: options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU instead of the one I add above.
.Well let me conclude the post with some handy wireless manager I use some time ago. Longly I (suffered) with Gnome’s default gnome-network-manager, nevertheless it’s proven thatpain doesn’t waste forever. Mine would not too:
I Googled just to know if there are Good alternatives to gnome-network-manager and I found the nifty Wicd manager. Which behaviour I like much more than the classicwifi-radar or gnome-network-manager. This days I heavily use the nice Wicd peace of soft. So in case if you still don’t have it installed on your GNU/Linux go for it! If you want to give some credits for this I hope helpful post please give them to God :)END—–
