Under Apache, custom logging can give you lots of information you might not have seen otherwise. I’ll let the documentation for Apache’s mod_log_config say most of this, but as a quick preview, you could try defining a custom log format up near the top of your httpd.conf with

LogFormat "%a %t %{Host}i \"%r\"" hostlog

for example, then in all of your Directory containers, you could do

CustomLog logs/forest-monsen-site-host-log hostlog

Then, in my case, /var/log/httpd/forest-monsen-site-host-log would contain lines like
192.168.0.3 [31/Aug/2010:08:53:24 -0500] www.forestmonsen.com "GET /aggregator/sources/2 HTTP/1.0"
192.168.0.5 [31/Aug/2010:08:53:24 -0500] www.forestmonsen.org "GET /images/house.gif HTTP/1.1"


And I’d be able to tell which hostname was originally requested by the user — before any of my mod_rewrite rules got to it. Good stuff.

###
“Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price“
Matt Richtel, New York Times, published 6 Jun 2010

“[Scientists] say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information… While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information… and
they experience more stress.”

I’ve been reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr — that’s fascinating, as well.

Solution: In a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), enter

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

Type in your password when requested. You’re done.

1. Install the scponly package using Ubuntu’s APT package management system.
2. Use the script provided to set up your first jail and your user’s home directory. For the location of the user’s jail, give the path of the directory you want to share.
3. Provide a password for the new user.
4. Ensure that the new user has permissions to read and write all the necessary directories in your Web site.


$ sudo apt-get install scponly
$ gzip -dc /usr/share/doc/scponly/setup_chroot/setup_chroot.sh.gz > /tmp/setup_chroot.sh
$ sudo /tmp/setup_chroot.sh


Next we need to set the home directory for this scponly user.
please note that the user's home directory MUST NOT be writeable
by the scponly user. this is important so that the scponly user
cannot subvert the .ssh configuration parameters.


for this reason, a writeable subdirectory will be created that
the scponly user can write into.

Note that I removed the /incoming subdirectory created by this script. There was no need for a separate directory for my buddy to upload files. He could have permissions over the whole site tree.


-en Username to install [scponly]
bob
-en home directory you wish to set for this user [/home/bob]
/var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs
-en name of the writeable subdirectory [incoming]


-e
creating /var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs/incoming directory for uploading files


Your platform (Linux) does not have a platform specific setup script.
This install script will attempt a best guess.
If you perform customizations, please consider sending me your changes.
Look to the templates in build_extras/arch.
- joe at sublimation dot org


please set the password for bob:
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
if you experience a warning with winscp regarding groups, please install
the provided hacked out fake groups program into your chroot, like so:
cp groups /var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs/bin/groups


This script added certain directories to the site root (/var/www/sites/bobsite/htdocs). Every other directory needed to be writable by Bob. So let’s add Bob to a special group, and allow that group write access on all the website’s files.


$ sudo adduser bob www-data


We can ignore /bin, /etc, /lib and other directories added to the chroot jail (the website filesystem):


$ sudo find . \! -user root -exec chgrp www-data \{\} \;
$ sudo find . \! -user root -exec chmod g+w \{\} \;


Good to go!

• Five websites: One Moodle and one Drupal site backed by MySQL databases, and three static sites. SSL setup.
• Added some software. How can I work without vim and slocate?
• Security hardening, including a service review, permissions, firewall setup, administrative access through SSH, sudo config, and Postfix with spam filtering.
• Nagios server monitoring config.

I checked my work logs and decided that I did pretty well, considering I got it all done in 10 hours 35 minutes.

$ locate libnpjp2.so
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
$ sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
$ cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins/
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .


Works for me!

To fix this, do something in MySQL like

SELECT nid
FROM node_revisions
WHERE body LIKE '%getnodecount%';


And edit the offending nodes in Drupal with a URL such as

http://example.com/node/123/edit

The biggest problem is that he claims that Drupal is impenetrable, which it is. For many beginners, it has a steep learning curve. But he never makes the connection; why do your site visitors care? If millions of them appear, and your site continues to work well in response because it was built with a solid operational foundation instead of being built with something that has a cute-but-heavy GUI on the backend, don’t they benefit? It looks to me like Chris has unfortunately conflated the needs of end-users with the needs of site developers.

Also, I’d like to take my hat off to the organization that landed the $18M contract to migrate recovery.gov into Sharepoint. That’s a lot of money for a site built using tables in HTML and containing leftover hidden cruft like “this Web Part Page has been personalized. As a result, one or more Web Part properties may contain confidential information. Make sure the properties contain information that is safe for others to read. After exporting this Web Part…”

Well, Ubuntu doesn’t cache DNS by default. Your cache rests within your router, or your assigned DNS servers. You could restart your router, if you have access to it. Or wait until the time-to-live has expired.

You can install a local resolver that will cache DNS addresses, if you like. It will speed up your Web access slightly, since your Web browser will check the local cache first. I imagine the time you save will be measured in milliseconds.

Do that with:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nscd

And to clear your local cache, restart the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart