The Apache2 HTTP Server is a modular program, where we can choose its functionality by including in the server a set of modules. The modules can be statically compiled into the httpd binary when the server is built. Alternatively, modules can be compiled as Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs) that exist separately from the main httpd binary file.

Normally enabling one particular apache DSO module will involve editing the main apache configuration file and adding a LoadModule line to enable the loading of the particular module. Depending from the module itself, we might need to add also some configuration directives. This will work fine on Debian also, but I am going to show you the Debian particular method of managing apache2 modules.

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Here is the list of the additional apache2 modules that can be installed from the Debian official repositories and a short description of them: Read the rest of this entry »

This is the list of the standard apache2 modules that are installed by the Debian apache2 package: actions, asis, auth_anon, auth_dbm, auth_digest, auth_ldap, cache, cern_meta, cgi, cgid, dav, dav_fs, deflate, disk_cache, expires, ext_filter, file_cache, headers, imap, include, info, ldap, mem_cache, mime_magic, proxy, proxy_connect, proxy_ftp, proxy_http, rewrite, speling, ssl, suexec, unique_id, userdir, usertrack, vhost_alias.

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This is the list of the standard apache2 modules that are compiled into the Debian apache2 binary: core, http_core, prefork/worker/perchild, mod_access, mod_auth, mod_log_config, mod_logio, mod_env, mod_setenvif, mod_mime, mod_status, mod_autoindex, mod_negotiation, mod_dir, mod_alias, mod_so.

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One of my articles (Backup your MySQL databases automatically) was featured on the front page of rootprompt.org… Cool!

I have created this post to keep track of the articles featured on rootprompt:

May 29, 2006 (thanks to Noel for submitting it): Backup your MySQL databases automatically
http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=10028

May 31, 2006: Managing Apache2 modules the Debian way
http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=10037

After being for a while in unstable, you will notice that starting today there is a new APT version available in testing (etch) release. This is version 0.6.44.1 and it introduces a change in the way the Package List is downloaded.
Until now, it used to download a single file that would have changed even if only one package would have been modified. Even though most of us don’t have any problem with that (doing daily updates, and no real bandwidth problems), still there are many peoples out there that have poor internet connections that I am sure will be very happy with this change. And even if you don’t care about the bandwidth (and to be honest most of the bandwidth usage will not come from the package list, but from the packages updates that are applied), you will notice that the process of apt-get update is much faster since it will only download a very small file with the differences (DiffIndex) instead of all the list.

The nice thing is, that other package management tools (like aptitude for example) will benefit from the same change without any update, as they are actually using APT utils for those operations. Read the rest of this entry »

If you site relies on MySQL and stores its sensitive data in a MySQL database, you will most definitely want to backup that information so that it can be restored in case of any disaster (manual mistake to delete some data, software errors, hardware errors, server compromise, etc.). In a previous post I have presented that MySQL provides the basic tool (mysqldump) to perform database backups. This is required because backing up a database is a little different than backing up regular files.

With mysqldump anyone can write a small shell script and running it from cron, it will achieve an automatic backup solution. There are many such scripts already available freely and also many commercial solutions also (I assume as I have not tested any really ). The script that I liked the most is AutoMySQLBackup, because it doesn’t have any real requirements (mysqldump of course is needed – in any mysql client package – and gzip or bzip2 to compress the resulting file) and has all the features I was looking for in such a script.

AutoMySQLBackup has all the features I needed: it can backup a single database, multiple databases, or all the databases on the server; each database is saved in a separate file that can be compressed (with gzip or bzip2); it will rotate the backups and not keep them filling your hard drive (as normal in the daily backup you will have only the last 7 days of backups, the weekly if enabled will have one for each week, etc.). It has also some other features (check the project homepage for full details), that I am not using myself (like email logs for example), but other peoples might find interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

More than a month ago I have seen a post by Joerg Jaspert on the Debian devel announce list that was announcing the inclusion of the amd64 port in the official Debian mirrors. At that time only the unstable branch was included, and he explained that amd64.debian.net will maintain the testing tree until this will be fully synced with the debian-installer so the Debian Etch system will use only Debian mirrors. If you are using the stable release (sarge) then this would not affect you in any way, as they will continue to keep it updated.

Since I manage several servers with Debian Etch AMD64, I was very happy to see that the amd64 port was finally approved and included in the official mirrors. There was no date when this will actually happen for the testing release, but it happened exactly as described: after a period of no updates, today you will notice 404s from amd64.debian.net, and this means it is finally over… Read the rest of this entry »

Today if you will upgrade your CPanel server (running a Stable branch) manually:

/scripts/upcp

you will notice that there is a new version update available: 10.8.2-STABLE_116, that follows up to the Release / Current / Edge versions from the past days (10.8.2-* versions).

In case you update your CPanel automatically, you will just notice the new version installed on the first run of the upgrade cron.

In case that you have just upgraded your perl version installed on a Gentoo system, don’t forget about the other packages that are compiled against the old perl version.

Let say that you have just upgraded to a new perl release using emerge:

emerge -ua perl

After you have done this don’t forget to use perl-cleaner to rebuild all your other packages that depended on the old perl version. This will go over your packages and provide you with a list of packages it will recompile. If used with the parameter ask it will allow you to decide if you want to continue or not. For example:

perl-cleaner modules ask

The perl-cleaner help page provides the full list of possible parameters:

Usage: /usr/bin/perl-cleaner [options] [ask]
modules - rebuild perl modules for old installs of perl
allmodules - rebuild perl modules for any install of perl
libperl - rebuild anything linked against libperl
revirter - replace perl-core modules with virtuals
ph-clean - clean out old ph files from a previous perl
phupdate - update existing ph files, useful after an upgrade to system parts like the kernel
phall - clean out old ph files and run phupdate
all - rebuild modules, libperl linkages, clean ph files, and rebuild them
reallyall - rebuild modules for any install of perl, libperl linkages, clean ph files, and rebuild them

ask - ask for confirmation on each emerge