2009 Jun 28 - Sun

Blosxom Reinstall on Debian Lenny 5.0.1

It is almost time to retire my perl based bloging server software known as blosxom. It has performed well. However, my page count is starting to get high, and blosxom is taking longer and longer to process. For now, I've moved it to faster hardware while I work on a different blog delivery mechanism (I hope to have Wt on C++ with PostgreSQL running the back-end soon).

Copying over the directory structure was no real problem. The only real thing needed was to put the mod_rewrite stuff back in so the unsightly cgi-bin url portion is removed. By default, mod_rewrite is not enabled. To enable it:

a2enmod rewrite

Here is what the rewrite stuff as it looks in sites-enabled/default file:

  RewriteLogLevel 0
  RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log

<Directory "/var/www/blog">
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
  Options +ExecCGI
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>

[/OpenSource/blosxom] permanent link

Perl Mason Install

Installing mason v1.42 from Mason HQ is quite straight-forward:

• apt-get install build-essential
• apt-get install libapache2-mod-apreq2
• apt-get install libapreq2-dev
• apt-get install libapache2-request-perl
• ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/apreq.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/apreq.load
• perl -MCPAN -eshell
• install HTML::Mason

[/OpenSource/Debian/Monitoring] permanent link

VMWare Mouse Release on Debian Lenny Guest

A simple message to myself. When installing a Debian Lenny 5.0.1 KDE guest in VMWare Workstation hosted on Windows XP, a few steps are required in order to move into and out of the guest without the ctrl-alt mouse release sequence:

• apt-get install build-essential on the guest
• apt-get install linux-headers-...
• build and install the VMWare toolkit in the guest
• add 'Option "CorePointer"' to the mouse section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• add 'Option "CoreKeyBoard"' to the keyboard section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• restart KDE

A visit to a VMWare Community describes a couple of additional steps for getting the VMWare Shared Folders (HGFS) Share to work inside of Lenny 5.0.1 as well. Basically, in the /etc/fstab file, which VMWare updates when you perform a tool install, append ',uid=1000,gid=1000' to the 'ttl=5' portion of the .host line, so it looks something like:

.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

The actual value to be used in place of 1000 is what ever your uid,gid are for your current window session. This an be determined at the command line by:

echo ${UID}

Without the uid/gid values in the fstab file, the share is made available for the root user. Anyway, after the restart, by using the file explorer, go to /mnt/hgfs to see the volumes.

[/OpenSource/Debian] permanent link

Web Statistics with awstats on Debian Lenny 5.0.1

On an old system, I used Webalizer to analyze Apache log files. On a newer system I thought I'd give awstats a try. I had two options, install via the original source, or install via apt-get. Considering the number of files and directories involved, I decided to go with the Debian package manager to install awstats.

The package manager to get things into decent directories, but it appears to have been built for an earlier flavour of Debian. A few things I had to fix up for working in Debian Lenny 5.0.1 with Apache v2.0 include:

• In /etc/cron.d/awstats, changing one of the file checks from /var/log/apache/access.log to /var/log/apache2/access.log
• changing the ownership of the logs in /var/log/apache from root.adm to root.www-data (an alternative might be www-data.adm)
• changing the creation ownership in /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 from 'create 640 root adm' to 'create 640 root www-data'
• in /etc/awstats/awstats.conf.loal, added 'LogFormat=1' and 'DirIcons=/awstats/icon'
• in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, added 'Alias /awstats/icon "/usr/share/awstats/icon"'
• the version of awstats installed was 6.5. I downloaded the awstats.pl file from awstats site and placed it in the /usr/lib/cgi-bin directly as a simple upgrade to v6.9.

During package installation, the package manager suggested some additional packages: libnet-dns-perl libnet-ip-perl libgeo-ipfree-perl. Perhaps when I get a chance, I'll install those and see what they add to the statistics management.

[/OpenSource/Debian] permanent link