You can now (actually, since August 24) get Opera 7.60 Preview 1 for Windows. Cool new features: something called Medium-Screen Rendering that “reformats pages so they fit better on smaller screens”, and speech-enabled browsing via XHTML+Voice 1.2! (4)

You are being served by Apache2 on Gentoo Linux

August 29th, 2004

OK I got Postfix and courier-imap up and running now. Plus, switching to a 2.6 kernel was as simple as changing it in the web-based Linode Platform manager and rebooting. Just select a few things and click a few form buttons. Very nice.

The migration to the new server didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped it to be, but all is good now and you are currently being served this webpage/rss feed by Apache2 web server running on a Gentoo Linux box.

Apache signature of new server at Linode.com


I’m using this Virtual Private Server (VPS) setup offered by Linode.com which is an unmanaged User Mode Linux hosting solution. Which means I’ve had to take a crash course in system administration in the attempt to transform a base Linux system with minimal services into a production web server. It’s hard because of the esoteric configuration that Linux is so notorious for, though it was still easier than I thought, and very satisfying when things progressed from a state of borkage to reasonable functionality. Gentoo’s Portage probably played a good hand in making things easy. emerge, emerge, emerge.

I still need to set up a email services (the whole kahuna - MTA, LDA, AA) - any advice on this area would be very nice.

More on Gentoo, system administration, User Mode Linux, and Linode later.

Posted by Chu Yeow at August 29, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (14) | Category: Personal

How to fold a shirt. Watch the video. I need to learn how to do this. (4)

Setting up AWStats on Gentoo

August 28th, 2004

Some notes to myself on setting up AWStats on a Gentoo box.

  1. First, emerge the awstats package. I added the “vhosts” USE flag because it’s listed as a USE flag that awstats reads, and I need support for virtual hosts (although I don’t know for sure what it does - I reckon it has something to do with the webapps-config package that’s a dependency).

    emerge -pv awstats
    USE=”vhosts” emerge awstats

  2. Don’t use the webapp-config program that the emerge process tells you to use at the end unless you know what you are doing. There have been reports that it isn’t exactly ideal in the Gentoo forums.

  3. Make a symbolic link to the Apache configuration directives we need to add to Apache in a convenient location. You may also want to make the file owner-writable (chmod u+w) since it’s read-only.

    ln -s /usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/postinst-en.txt /etc/apache2/conf/awstats.conf

  4. I had to add this bit to /etc/apache2/conf/awstats.conf prevent a 403 error when accessing the ScriptAliased /awstats directory.

    <directory “/usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/hostroot/cgi-bin/”>
    Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all</directory>

  5. Include the AWStats-required configuration directives in the main Apache config file (mine’s /etc/apache2/conf/apache2.conf).

    Include conf/awstats.conf

  6. I’m using name-based virtual hosts, with logs for each of them (they are in the included vhosts/vhosts.conf file). AWStats by default parses the Combined log format and this is what I specify for my access logs as well. An example VirtualHost directive:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName blog.codefront.net
    DocumentRoot /www/codefront.net/htdocs/blog
    ServerPath /blog
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/blog.codefront.net/access_log combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/blog.codefront.net/error_log
    </VirtualHost>

  7. Now, create an AWStats configuration file for each virtual-host.

    cp /etc/awstats/awstats.model.conf /etc/awstats/awstats.blog.codefront.net.conf

    Notice that the configuration file name is of the format “awstats.domain.tld.conf”.

  8. Edit the configuration file (/etc/awstats/awstats.blog.codefront.net.conf). The important things to change are:

    • LogFile (point this to your access log)
    • SiteDomain (your site’s domain name)
    • HostAliases (any aliases your site may have)
    • DirData (AWStats database where your results will be stored. This has to be writable by the Apache user if the AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser option is turned on.)
    • DirCgi (AWStats CGI directory)
    • DirIcons (AWStats icons directory)

  9. Restart Apache.

    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

  10. You can access AWStats from www.example.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.example.com.

  11. Set password-protection for the AWStats directory.

  12. Run AWStats from the command line to update it. You’d likely want to set up a cron job for this.

    /usr/bin/awstats_updateall.pl now -awstatsprog=/usr/share/webapps/awstats/6.1/hostroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -configdir=/etc/awstats/

Useful links:

Posted by Chu Yeow at August 28, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (7) | Category: Web development

Gabe Newell, head of Valve Software, posts that Half-Life 2 is going gold on Monday, as GameSpot reports. We could see HL2 on shelves in a week! (3)

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