Category: BSD/Linux

So, after switching over to the new server all of the sudden everything was hanging every time a comment was entered. I couldn’t figure it out for quite some time. I looked at all the error logs to no avail. I noticed that it worked for one site but not the other. What was it????

It was this seemingly unrelated message about sending an email:

Feb 23 23:55:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: My unqualified host name (topbarbee) unknown; sleeping for retry

Feb 23 23:56:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: unable to qualify my own domain name (topbarbee) — using short name

Feb 23 23:56:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: My unqualified host name (topbarbee) unknown; sleeping for retry

Not sure why it references sendmail since that’s off but whatever. Finally! Once I made the connection (a few hours later) a quick Google shows you need to update you /etc/hosts for both the internal and external IP address! I was missing the internal bit.

::1                     localhost localhost.my.domain topbarbee themumsy

127.0.0.1               localhost localhost.my.domain topbarbee themumsy

MariaDB is the offshoot of MySQL created by the original creator of MySQL. The point being to maintain a non-Oracle, open-source version of ‘MySQL’ since Oracle has since aquired MySQL. I don’t know I care either way but supposedly MariaDB is faster than MySQL also so that’s why I did the switch.

The switch was a piece of cake. I moved from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.3 just by exporting the databases from MySQL, moving them to the new server, and loading them to MariaDB.

So for anyone afraid of making the switch you don’t at least have to worrying about the migration of data. So far MariaDB seems fine inasmuch as I don’t have any issues, it just works.

Reposting from 2013 – why did I post this originally on Valentine’s day – so romantic!

I’m going to start another blog. I’ll post a link here once it’s up. As a part of that I want to share 1 server with mulitple domains. So that’s going to add some load. I started with Apache but decided to give nginx a try. It always sounded to be more efficient and randomly the side is brought down by too much activity. Maybe nginx will be better. So far so good.

Old post copied forward – I never plan on using Apache again but maybe it helps someone else!

I have a Tomcat server running (not for topbarbee anymore) and wanted to put a bit more security around logins to it. So I wanted to do 2 things –

1. Add digested passwords in Tomcat’s tomcat-users.xml
2. Make logins sent from the web browser sent as a digest authentication

Simple, no?

And here’s another thing I posted 4 years ago (reposted with backdating in 2016) about something I’ve totally forgotten! Could very well be useful.

Surfing the internet on public wifi is not secure. Anyone could be snooping on your communication. I’ve a computer running FreeBSD 9.0 that I use for many things and I’ve recently added VPN to one of those things. I imagine you could use other BSDs, Linux, or OS X for this also. I imagine even Windows could do it.