Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Why I love Apache's Ldap Studio

I've gotta modify some attributes on people in our ActiveDirectory. The fun Microsoft way to do this is to download ADAM-adsi management console plugin, and then go from there. It's pretty basic and is usual MS ugliness. On the other hand, Apache Ldap Studio provides a much better user experience. Being built on top of Eclipse enables a slick interface and a very intuitive way of dealing with your directory (browsing, searching, editing). Kudos to the guys that wrote it, I can now enjoy mucking with AD from my Mac with ease and finesse.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Remote files in Emacs

Today I decided I was sick of always SSHing everywhere only to open up a couple of files for editing and then saving them. It doesn't make sense to copy my .emacs everywhere either. I discovered Tramp, and it just makes me all the more happy with my Emacs zealotry. Even better, my current snapshot already includes it.

Works great with dired too:
/ssh:hoser@somebox:/whateverdirectory

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

installing the latest nginx on OS X

I've read a lot about nginx lately and wanted to test its performance for our up-and-coming Ruby on Rails CRM application. It looked very easy to setup and easily configurable (especially with this). My first attempt was installing it through MacPorts, but that didn't fly, as I received the unpleasant "dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib". Turns out I had the same problem when trying to execute after building straight from source (which happened to be a newer version).

So with MacPorts I installed pcre 7.2_0, deactivated 7.0_0, created the symlink as "sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/" and was then able to start up nginx from the source build. Unfortunately the generated configuration file I am using expected a user and group for "nginx". A quick work around for that was to just reference myself instead. Here's what I ended up with (awaiting tweaks and optimizations):


#user and group to run as
user russ russ;

# number of nginx workers
worker_processes 2;

# pid of nginx master process
pid logs/nginx.pid;

# Number of worker connections. 1024 is a good default
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

# start the http module where we config http access.
http {
# pull in mime-types. You can break out your config
# into as many include's as you want to make it cleaner
include conf/mime.types;

# set a default type for the rare situation that
# nothing matches from the mimie-type include
default_type application/octet-stream;

# configure log format
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $status '
'"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "http_x_forwarded_for"';

# main access log
access_log logs/access.log main;

# main error log
error_log logs/error.log debug;
#error_log logs/error.log debug_http;

# no sendfile on OSX
sendfile on;

# These are good default values.
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay off;
# output compression saves bandwidth
gzip on;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml
application/xml+rss text/javascript;

# this is where you define your mongrel clusters.
# you need one of these blocks for each cluster
# and each one needs its own name to refer to it later.
upstream vscrm {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
server 127.0.0.1:8001;
server 127.0.0.1:8002;
}

# the server directive is nginx's virtual host directive.
server {
# port to listen on. Can also be set to an IP:PORT
listen 80;

# sets the domain[s] that this vhost server requests for
server_name vscrm;

# doc root
root /home/russ/forge/svn/vscrm/trunk/public;

# vhost specific access log
access_log logs/vscrm.access.log main;

#Set the max size for file uploads to 50Mb
client_max_body_size 50M;

# this rewrites all the requests to the maintenance.html
# page if it exists in the doc root. This is for capistrano's
# disable web task
if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html){
rewrite ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html last;
break;
}

if ($host ~* "www") {
rewrite ^(.*)$ http://vscrm$1 redirect;
break;
}

location / {


# needed to forward user's IP address to rails
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

# needed for HTTPS
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect false;
proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

# check for index.html for directory index
# if its there on the filesystem then rewite
# the url to add /index.html to the end of it
# and then break to send it to the next config rules.
if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
}

# this is the meat of the rails page caching config
# it adds .html to the end of the url and then checks
# the filesystem for that file. If it exists, then we
# rewite the url to have explicit .html on the end
# and then send it on its way to the next config rule.
# if there is no file on the fs then it sets all the
# necessary headers and proxies to our upstream mongrels
if (-f $request_filename.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
}

if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://vscrm;
break;
}
}

error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
}
}