Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.

I have been using tracks for some time now, as it was the best choice I could find for a ToDo software that was simple but also good looking, like some of the commercial applications that are out there. Since recently I had to move my installation to another server, I thought to document it and hopefully this might be useful for other peoples also. The official project docs are a little outdated and don’t take advantage that now debian etch has full support for all the needed dependencies and they can be easily installed from debian repositories (except tracks itself ).

The instructions will show how you can install and run tracks using MySQL and the built-in WEBrick server. You can run trakcs with SQLite/SQLite3 or Postgresql if you prefer, and for this look into the installation.html file that comes with the source. Read the rest of this entry »

I just stumbled across this interesting mysql tuning script called MySQLTuner. Don’t see this (or any other similar script) as the magical tool that will optimize your mysel server… There is no such thing, because there are so many different applications and each will require its specific database tunings.
Still, mysqltuner can be very useful tool in many cases, like for ex:

• it gives a quick overview on your running mysql configuration and some common sense recommendations.
• i really liked how it computes the total amount of memory needed for the current configuration (assuming all global buffers will be used and the maximum number of threads being connected).
• very simple usage: you just have to download and run it.

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Clamav is probably the most popular open source antivirus software for Linux. At this time it contains 153727 signatures that will detect most viruses and the signatures are updated regularly to allow many mail servers to filter out the viruses before even reaching the users mailboxes.

This post will show how easy it is to install and use SaneSecurity 3rd party Clamav signatures to extend the antivirus protection built-in clamav with Scam and Phishing filtering. This can be very useful as these types of emails can be hard to detect by common antispam rules (spamassassin for ex.) - like the latest pdf spams, or phishing mails that are not always easy to detect. These will be filtered out directly by Clamav that is normally running prior to antispam measures.

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Maildir is a huge improvement over mbox for storing local mails of users. Why? I will not go into a long explanation about this, because it is not the scope of this post, but just consider that saving each mail in its own file on the disk (Maildir) opposed to saving all mails in a single file (mbox) is much faster. Not only faster, but it is also much easier to manipulate the files (that are individual mails) on the system. For more details on maildir vs. mbox you can see http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

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PHP Accelerators/Cachers will boost the performance of your PHP applications, by caching the compiled form of php scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling the code every time the page is loaded. A PHP accelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times. Normally you will install these in the form of a php extension.

This list contains all the php accelerator solutions available at this time, with a short description and some personal notes. When choosing a php accelerator for your site, you should evaluate:
- evaluate the speed improvement. Normally any php application will gain at least 100% in speed only by installing any php accelerator, but you should do your own benchmark to see if it is useful or not.
- look for any problems caused by this. Your application might break or crash randomly after installing a php accelerator. The current solutions look pretty stable, but still this might happen. Read the rest of this entry »

For various reasons, I have to look from time to time at one particular IP and try to find out some information about it. Until I have found out about geoiplookup, this was something like: nslookup to get the reverse of the IP, and then whois to find out more details (maybe also traceroute/mtr, etc.). But now I will always start with geoiplookup as it instantly shows me the location (read country) of the respective IP.

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Awstats is probably the best open source web stat program available (with other projects like webalizer and analog, no longer being maintained). Besides many security problems that are found all the time in Awstats, the main problem that bothered me is its speed. Awstats is written in perl, and this means that it will be considerably slower than a similar program written in C for example (like webalizer for example). There is not much we can do to speed awstats, but on high traffic sites (with logs growing over a few Gigs of data per day) this can be a real problem…

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This little post will guide you how to quickly install the MaxMind Geo::IP Perl Module that has different usages as shown in other posts. This module should be faster than the other MaxMind perl module (Geo::IP::PurePerl) but it will require to have the GeoIP C library installed in order to be compiled.

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Here you can find various tips & tricks for configuring and administrating Apache that I found to be useful. Once I will add a new tip, I’ll link it here so you can use this page as a main placeholder for all the tips I will post in the future. Each tip will consist in a very short description, what is it used for, where can you apply it (globally, per directory or per virtual hosts, if it can be activated without administrative privileges in .htaccess) and of course a how to implement it. I will try to keep each tip as short as possible and on a single topic so you can go directly to what you are looking for. Read the rest of this entry »

DOS text files traditionally have carriage return and line feed pairs as their newline characters, while Unix text files have the line feed as their newline character. I often find myself needing to ‘clean-up’ some files saved with Win/DOS characters, and this can be done very easy with dos2unix. While RedHat based Linux distributions will traditionally include these small utils by default, on Debian I have to install them if needed.

For example, just today while I was working on an awstats project and needed to use the contributed file logresolvemerge.pl, I had again this problem. The file logresolvemerge.pl included in the awstats package from Debian, needs cleaning up as showed by the error: Read the rest of this entry »