I recently implemented a way to limit access by IP range on specific blogs on WordPress MU. As you know, WordPress MU uses Apache Rewrite engine to rewrite URLs. For instance, you have a blog on WordPress MU called “intranet”. Apache Rewrite takes the “intranet” string in the URL and automatically rewrites it as a value in the PHP script. A side effect to Apache Rewrite is that “Directory” .htaccess parameters don’t work. So, if you wanted only your company IPs to access an internal blog, you will need to use Apache Rewrite parameters instead. For the solution, read on…

Recently, there was a Mailman upgrade that seems to break Mailman if you don’t have a list called “mailman” on your server. Symptoms of this error include:

/var/log/mailman/error
mailmanctl(2801): PID unreadable in: /var/run/mailman/mailman.pid
mailmanctl(2801): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/run/mailman/mailman.pid'
mailmanctl(2801): Is qrunner even running?


If you try to restart mailman
/etc/rc2.d/S20mailman restart
and get the same error, then you need to check whether you have a “mailman” list on your server.

To install mailman list, follow this resource:
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/why_is_mailman_complaining_site_list_is_missing_mailman.html

After installing the mailman list, you can try restarting the mailman qrunner service to see if it works.
/etc/rc2.d/S20mailman start

I’ve been starting work on getting JASIG CAS (Central Authentication Server) to work with all my applications. One of the requirements for JASIG is that it needs to run on Apache Tomcat. Following the instructions on http://www.debianadmin.com/how-to-setup-apache-tomcat-55-on-debian-etch.html I was able to get the basics running on the Tomcat 5.5 server. However, I did encounter issues when trying to add in a *.WAR application to the server. I copied the files in the correct place /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps but for some reason the files weren’t getting deployed. I figured out the simple fix for getting these applications to work in the webapps folder:

Here’s what I currently use to determine how long it takes to generate a page in PHP. Its only 8 lines of code.

I’ve been working on tuning my Apache/MySQL/PHP configuration lately to see how to improve the performance. Lately, I’ve been noticing some crawlers that have been ignoring my robots.txt file and hitting my server really hard with several page requests every second. So, I decided to run some tests to see where I could speed up my website in the code.