monline

Googling in the subject shows that you can downgrade PHP packages to Lenny versions without much trouble. However the already documented methods lacked a few things I consider important, thus I write down my own downgrade instructions for future reference.

My preferred Apache directives are:

I've experienced the same weird behavior regarding the SVN-ACTION environment variable as Max Cantor in his post to the users@httpd mailing list. However a fairly obvious workaround can be set up with a few additional lines in the config.

A good article, I used to set up FCGI the same way. I had to find all the necessary info myself, when I first tried to use FCGI with a multi-site setup (separate PHP config, etc. for each site), but I'm glad that meanwhile somebody took the time to write it down.

A straight to the point guide on how to configure the built-in Apache (where are the config and command files), etc. As it turns out, it already ships with PHP support and it was already running for some reason. Never mind. The first thing I did after installing the OS was to set up a firewall (ipfw in this case), so having an Apache on the inside did really not matter much (probably took a few MBs of the memory). But now I need it anyway, so I'm not very upset that I didn't have to install it from scratch.

Calling the cron.php of a Drupal site is fairly easy. You just have to put something similiar into your server's /etc/crontab:
Or you can place this wget call in a file in /etc/cron.hourly.

However on a server with quite some Drupal sites (and possibly a number of virtualhosts) the maintenance of these cron.php calls in your crontab becomes very annoying (and it is prone to errors). On a busy development server Drupal sites come and go every day. So why not do these calls automatically? The attached script does just that.

Basically you'll need the mod_auth_pam module (the libapache2-mod-auth-pam package in Debian) and the mod_auth_sys_group module (the libapache2-mod-auth-sys-group package in Debian). The latter is only needed in case you want to authenticate against groups and not just users.

I use a Mac at home and Ubuntu at work, but in both cases I use Firefox to browse the web. I've a nice set of Adblock filters and I started thinking how to share the same filter set between my home Firefox profile and my profile at work. Here's the story.

This blog entry contains links to two PDFs on Wikipedia's architecture and how they dealt with the LAMP stack. One is Wikipedia: Site internals, configuration, code examples and management issues (the workbook), the other is a presentation on Wikimedia Architecture. The letter is lighter on the topic, easier to digest if you've only 5 minutes.

It can be a little bit tricky (or at least I've not found a clear description on this topic in the Apache docs) to tell where the mod_rewrite module of Apache 2.2.x is going to look for a file if you use a condition. I've had a hard time to get this clear and maybe sharing my experience will benefit others.