I will describe how to configure Ruby on Rails with Phusion Passenger on a Debian (Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.4 (lenny)) server.

1. We start by resynchronizing the package index files with their sources

# apt-get update

2. Then we check if MySQL is installed

# mysql -V
mysql  Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.51a, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2

You should run the following command if MySQL isn’t installed

# apt-get install mysql-server-5.0

Please choose a secure MySQL root password when this question is asked by the MySQL installer

3. We can now start by installing ruby

# apt-get install ruby irb rdoc

These 3 packages will be configured automatically on your server so no further configuration is required. After the installation of these packages you should be able to run the ruby-command

# ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [x86_64-linux]

4. We now need to install the rubygems module. Gems is the package manager for ruby which gives the users an easy way to install additional ruby modules.There are 2 methods to install gems onto your system. There is the apt-get method, and there is the manual one. We could use apt-get to install gems but this has a limitation, you won’t be able to update your ruby configuration using

# gem update --system

So we choose the manual method to install gems. Don’t copy the next link before you have checked the rubyforge.org website for the most recent version of rubygems.

# cd /usr/src
# wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/70696/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
# tar -xvzf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
# cd rubygems-1.3.7
# ruby setup.rb
RubyGems 1.3.7 installed

=== 1.3.7 / 2010-05-13

NOTE:
...
New features:
...
Bug fixes:
...
RubyGems installed the following executables:
        /usr/bin/gem1.8

Now for the ease of use we will create a link to run the binary gem1.8 as the command gem.

# ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem # gem -v 1.3.7

5. We will now move on to the installation of Rails, this component can be easily installed by launching the following command

# gem install rails

It can take several minutes before you will see any output but you just have to be patient.

Successfully installed rake-0.8.7
Successfully installed activesupport-2.3.8
Successfully installed activerecord-2.3.8
Successfully installed rack-1.1.0
Successfully installed actionpack-2.3.8
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.3.8
Successfully installed activeresource-2.3.8
Successfully installed rails-2.3.8
8 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for rake-0.8.7...
Installing ri documentation for activesupport-2.3.8...
Installing ri documentation for activerecord-2.3.8...
Installing ri documentation for rack-1.1.0...
Installing ri documentation for actionpack-2.3.8...
Installing ri documentation for actionmailer-2.3.8...
Installing ri documentation for activeresource-2.3.8...
Installing ri documentation for rails-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.8.7...
Installing RDoc documentation for activesupport-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for rack-1.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionpack-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionmailer-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for activeresource-2.3.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for rails-2.3.8...

We can now check if rails was installed succesfully.

# rails -v
Rails 2.3.8

6. It is now time to test by creating a rails application. My webroot is configured under /var/www so I’ll use this in my test but you should verify your webroot before following these steps.

# cd /var/www
# rails hello
# cd hello
# script/server

This will result in the following output

=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 2.3.8 application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.8/lib/initializer.rb:271:in `require_frameworks': no such file to load -- net/https (RuntimeError)

We get this error because the ruby openssl library is required so we install this.

# apt-get install libopenssl-ruby
# script/server -d
=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 2.3.8 application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000

The “-d” parameter starts rails and detaches the process so that you can continue working within your shell.

7.  We can now move on to installing Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) as the configuration of Ruby and Rails has succeeded.

# apt-get install ruby-dev
# gem install passenger
# passenger-config --version
2.2.15

We now need to configure the Passenger apache module, this can be done by the following command. You’ll probably get some errors that certain modules are missing but you can easily install them to comply with the Passenger requirements.

# passenger-install-apache2-module
The Apache 2 module was successfully installed.

Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

After you restart Apache, you are ready to deploy any number of Ruby on Rails
applications on Apache, without any further Ruby on Rails-specific
configuration!

Press ENTER to continue.

Check if your apache config (mine is /etc/apache2/apache2.conf) has the line /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/*.load. If not you can just add this line to your apache config.

8. We will now create the apache Passenger module and activate it.

# cd /etc/apache2/mods-available/
# touch passenger.load
# vi passenger.load

enter the following lines and save the file.

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

# ln -s ../mods-available/passenger.load passenger.load
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
# a2enmod

You can now find “passenger” in this list so just type “passenger” and press enter to activate this apache module. Now restart apache.

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

9. The final step is to let apache know where to find your app. Therefore you need to modify the apache configuration file of the vhost that will run your app, for example /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default. Following this manual the following lines need to be configured in this config file:

DocumentRoot /var/www/hello/public
PassengerAppRoot /var/www/hello/

10. You now have a working Ruby on Rails environment with Phusion Passenger. If you want more information about Phusion Passenger there is always the user guide at http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html.

Just follow these steps to configure the classic alt-tab in Windows 7:

• Open the command line (windows-button + r OR start > run)
• Type in the command regedit
• navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
• Now add a new DWORD value in Explorer with the name AltTabSettings and set the value to 1
• Now close regedit

You will now be able to use the classic alt-tab.

Fortunately it isn’t a big issue to modify the tab behavior yourself. Just type about:config in your address bar and press enter. you’ll get a warning from firefox to be careful on the next page.
You have now entered in the configuration panel of firefox which lets you modify more than the default options.

Here are some modification options to optimize the tab behavior to your likings, each op the parameters can be modified by double-clicking on it. Modified settings can be recognised as they are in a bold font.

• browser.allTabs.previews: if true your browser will show a preview of each tab if you click on the allTabs button on the far right end of your tab bar. If false a list of open tabs will be shown.
• browser.allTabs.previews: if true your browser will show a preview of the pages as you use ctrl+tab to navigate between your tabs. If false you can just cycle through your open tabs.
• browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent: if true firefox will open every new tab next to the current working tab on your tab bar. If false firefox will open every new tab at the far end of your tab bar.

These are just some options I modified to optimize my personal behavior but you can use this about:config page to modify more settings but be aware of what settings you modify.

As we had a rental car we were not bound to excursions organised by our tour operator so we had the freedom to explore the island on our own rate and combine different excursions. The first trip we made was to the Jardin de Cactus, created by the island’s main architect César Manrique. This is a garden which has over more than 1000 types op cactuses from over the entire planet. It’s a beautiful thing to see all these kinds of cactuses which you couldn’t imagine they existed.

As I mentioned before César Manrique is the main architect of the island Lanzarote and his architectural ideas were used as a standard all over the island. We visited his home where he used to live until his fatal car accident in 1992 and I must say that his home was impressive. This house was build on and even through a coagulated lava field as you can see in the following images.

Another trip we made was to the Timanfaya National Park whis is a large area mainly populated with coagulated lava and craters from volcano eruptions. This was impressive to see but personally I wasn’t very keen on the mandatory bus tour. Tourists cannot explore this area on their own so you need to take a bus tour which only stops at certain times but doesn’t let you leave the bus. This same day we also went to El Golfo which is a crater and laguna located in the west of Lanzarote. Personally this was one of my Lanzarote-favorites as you can see in the next images. I could stand there all day just to watch the water move and clank to the rocks.

After these trips we decided to go on another kind of tour of Lanzarote; the wine-tour. La Geria is a zone of vineyards in the centre of Lanzarote and has 7 bodega’s where you can taste some wines, created in these vineyards. Out of these 7 bodega’s, 6 are located within a zone of 500 metres and we checked afterwards to notice that it took us about 3 hours to get past of this zone. But in the meanwhile we had tasted a lot of different wines La Geria has to offer. I’m not a wine connoisseur but I tasted a lot of difference between the wines and I loved it .

On our last day of trips we went to Jameos Del Agua which is a small cave known for its white blind crabs. Personally this was somewhat of a disappointment. It is a small dark cave, you can see the very tiny crabs but after 5 minutes you have seen it all and the museum attached to this place is in my opinion only built to justify the 8 euros entry fee. Afterwards we headed to Cueva de los Verdes which is a cave of approximately 6 to 7 kilometers built by a large lava-stream underneath the island. This is very impressive to see but the most impressive part of the day came later on as we visited the Mirador Del Rio, a viewpoint in the very north of Lanzarote. The view up there is amazing but in this case images speak louder than words.

Previous information was only the nature-part of our holiday but you cannot go to spain without eating some tapas and in our case, a lot of tapas. We visited tapas bars every day and we can say that we found some very good ones. My favorites were Bodega, located in the center of Puerto Del Carmen (Calle del Roque Nublo 5, to be more specific) and a small one in the center of Yaïza (I’m not sure but I believe it was called La Terracita).

Other than this we also enjoyed the weather which was averaged to a bit more than 20 degrees during our stay of a week. For me it was awkward to walk between christmas decoration wearing sunglasses and a t-shirt.

If you want to see more images than provided in this article you can always check the entire collection at http://www.dimitri.eu/gallery2/v/lanzarote/.

• imageshack.us
• wikipedia.org
• mininova.org
• myspace.com
• youtube.com
• sourceforge.net

This already is a fine curriculum so I thought it was time to configure a lighttpd server (with MySQL5 and PHP5 support) myself although I don’t come across any customers (I work at a hosting provider) who are using this at the moment.

We start of knowing that I usually work on debian-servers so some commands will not work on fedora, red-hat, and others.

First of all we check if apache isn’t already installed which it is in a lot of cases.

dpkg -l | grep apache

ii  apache2-doc            2.2.3-4+etch6    documentation for apache2
ii  apache2-mpm-prefork    2.2.3-4+etch6    Traditional model for Apache
ii  apache2-utils          2.2.3-4+etch6    utility programs for webservers
ii  apache2.2-common       2.2.3-4+etch6    Next generation, scalable,

If apache seems to be installed we will need to remove it to avoid conflicts on port 80.

apt-get remove apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-common

Now we will install MySQL (The “-y” parameter avoids questions during the install by answering “yes” to every question.

apt-get install –y mysql-server mysql-client

We start MySQL.

/etc/init.d/mysql start

We configure the MySQL root password.

mysqladmin -u root password ''password_of_your_choice''

After the succesfull installation of MySQL we continue the configuration by installing lighttpd.

apt-get install -y lighttpd

Just as a test we can now surf to the hostname or ip-address of your server to verify the succesfull installation.

The default document root is /var/www/ and the configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.

We will now install PHP5 as a fastCGI module, we will also add some other PHP5-modules so that these can also be addressed by PHP..

apt-get install -y php5-cgi php5-mysql php5-curl ...

After this installation we will need to modify the configuration files of PHP and lighttpd. In the PHP configuration file (eg. /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini) we add the following line (preferably at the end of the file.

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

In the lighttpd configuration file (/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf) we modify “server.modules” by adding a new line

"mod_fastcgi",

At the end of this file we also need to add a few lines to tell the webserver that all files with the .php extension need to be handled by the FastCGI module.

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>((
"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi",
"socket" => "/tmp/php.socket"
)))

After saving this configuration file we can restart the lighttpd service.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

We can now test be creating a basic php-file like info.php with the following content

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

We can now witness a working lighttpd webserver with PHP5 loaded.

This year, websitefiles were modified by making a FTP connection towards the hosting or server and adding malicious code within the webserver’s default documents (index.html, index.php, index.asp, default.html,…). As a hosting provider we were very annoyed with this situation because we couldn’t figure out the cause of these hacks at first.
Within normal circumstances we check the logfiles of the webserver (if present) and in 95% of the cases we are able to find the specific cause but now we weren’t able to find any information. We could only notice that every website that was hacked had iFrames which contained redirects towards websites ending with the .cn extension.

Until we stumbeled upon the website www.unmaskparasites.com… this website has detailed information about this specific issue and we gained more information on the cause of this new trend. Apparently a virus, present on your computer, makes use of a known vulnerability in adobe acrobat reader to retrieve the FTP credentials of your hosting or server and this virus uses these credentials to connect, without you knowing, and modify your default website files.

The injection of iFrames was just one way to hack websites because a few weeks ago another method gained popularity: Meta Redirects. The same virus that abuses the adobe acrobat reader vulnerability gains access to the hosting or server and uploads a PHP script. This script is then used to abuse security flaws of the system-software (PHP, Apache, Linux,…) so that visitors of a website are ridirected towards webistes such as goscanpark.com, goscansome.com, and many others that look like correct antivirus websites.

If you notice one of these kinds of abuse on your website(s) you should follow the next steps to prevent this issue from escalating:

• Scan your computer with anti-virus and anti-spyware tools.
• Once these scans have cleaned your computer you should modify the FTP-password(s) of your website(s).
• Remove the malicious code (iFrames) and malicious scrpts. You can erase the current files and replace them with a recent clean backup.
• Contact your hostingprovider or server administrator so they can do a double-check of your hosting or server. This suggestion is very important because some cases are known where scripts are running under a “crontab” (or other) user and these can be identified by the hosting provider.

You can find more information about these kind of issues on the pages:

• http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2009/04/15/malicious-income-iframes-from-cn-domains/
• http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2009/07/23/goscanpark-13-facts-about-malicious-server-wide-meta-redirects/

I hope this information was helpfull.

The “aslmanager” process is Apple’s System Logfile manager which will be used as a replacement for syslogd in future versions of Mac OSX. But this is a rather new service which contains a few bugs that cause the application to use more than 2GB of virtual memory.

The solution to this issue isn’t to kill this process as it can cause data corruption but to restart the process after cleaning out the “data store” (where the process keeps its files). This can be done by following these few steps:

• open the terminal utility
• stop the syslog with the following command: sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
• stop the aslmanager with the following command: sudo launchctl stop com.apple.aslmanager
• create a new folder on your desktop with a random name like “temp”
• move all of the files from the folder /var/log/asl/ towards the new folder on your desktop, this can be done with the command: mv /var/log/asl/* ∼Desktop/temp/
• you can now start the syslogd with the following command: sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

You may have noticed that we didn’t start the aslmanager manually because this process will be started automatically when this is needed by the syslogd.

This was a solution to the high load on my Mac and I haven’t encountered this issue until now.

The last days in Mexico were the days of relaxing and snorkeling at the beach. We still made one excursion to Isla Mujeres which is a small Island from about 8 km in length and 1 km in width. We explored this island by golfcart which is the best and coolest way to travel there.

I won’t bother you with a rather long post but I will just point you to the large amount of photos that were taken during this trip. These photos can be viewed by going to my gallery.

Have fun.

The first one is the Mayan culture which is still alive among the Mexican people. I have noticed this while visiting some of the ancient beauty that was left by the Mayan people. I visited Chichen Itza, which is one of the seven wonders of the world, and I must say that it is truly amazing to see how the Mayans were able to build such a fantastic city.
Later that day we visited the city Valladolid which is an authentic Mexican city without tourist-based buildings and restaurants so we were able to eat some real Mexican food.

Today`s program had some more animals in it as we first visited Coba as an ancient Mayan site in the jungle (we could now climb a big temple,  which isn’t allowed in Chichen Itza) and later on we went to the nearest lake for a meet and greet with some wild crocodiles.
Later on we went to Punta Laguna to see some other animals in their natural habitat. Punta Laguna is a nature reserve in the jungle which isn’t well known by tourists. Within this reserve we saw spider-monkeys, woodpeckers, bats and other animals. This was truly amazing.

Between these excursion days we got to know another part of the Mexican culture, being the night life. Playa del Carmen has some great spots to go out, drink and meet new people. I went to Señor Frogs and Dubai Club but I am sure that there are more to come.

I will close this post by telling you that I arrived in my second hotel yesterday which has luxury written all over it; from the bellboy who parks our car, over the venetion gondola and the pool bar, to the jacuzzi in the room.

Adios

Off course there were times when I wasn’t drinking tequila and this was when I was just enjoying the beautiful beach with the clear blue water which changes colours every time a ray of sun touches it.

This day we visited the city Tulum and more specific it’s wonderful Mayan site. It was wonderful to see the pieces of ancient art which were the houses the Mayan people of the Yacatan area lived in. This site also has a marvelous beach which I can’t describe, you will have to wait for the pictures.

Later that day we went to visit one of the cenotes (a limestone sinkhole filled with water) near our hotel but yet again, it’s beauty cannot be described in words.

I will conclude this post but I will keep you posted within a few days.