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.

• 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.