* * * * *

                                 Brick walls

Well, I was going to enable the new feature but three things got in the way:

 1. Last month there was a security audit run against a server [1] belonging
    to one of our customers. Over the past month I harded up the DNS (Domain
    Name Service) servers and the router and the only thing left was to
    harden the server itself. And at this point, it was easier to just set
    up a new server.

 1. So this past week that's what we've been doing. Tuesday the machine was
    put together. Yesterday the base operating system was installed. And
    since I just know we'll be doing the “Update Dance” once this thing gets
    certified (despite of what Smirk thinks—any bug in any of the services
    will require an automatic update immediately) I decided to install the
    critical services (Apache [2], PHP [3], OpenSSH [4]) from source just to
    avoid having to rely upon the vendor. That way, I can just download the
    latest tarball, ./configure ; make ; make install (which I find easier)
    than the whole “package manager” crap (“Oooh, sorry. You forgot to
    upgrade your package manager for a whole week and we've moved the
    repository—sorry! Oh, and we're no longer supporting that version of the
    distribution anyway so you're doubly screwed! Sorry.”)

 1. It was going along fine until PHP and Ravencore [5] (yes, a control
    panel). PHP because the braindead make install installed the PHP modules
    in the oh-so-intuitive location of /usr/lib/20020429/ instead of
    something semi-sane like /usr/local/lib/php-thisweeksversion/modules/,
    and Ravencore because they only release code in RPM (Redhat Package
    Manager) and because it breaks if you change the PHP configuration file
    after Ravencore itself been installed (because you just realized that
    PHP installed the PHP modules in /usr/lib/20020429/ but it never
    complained about them being missing and the default PHP configuration
    file doesn't bother to even include the PHP modules).

 1. That's all I'm going to say about that!

 2. I wanted to write to Google [6] explaining my concerns over thier
    AdSense program [7] and how their ad selection can't deal with my
    general purpose (read: “horribly unfocused”) blog and how I'm thinking
    of no longer displaying ads.

 2. I don't want to drop out of the program entirely, in the hopes they
    change how it works just slightly. The feature I added (and more on that
    in a bit) won't be of use with AdSense, but it will be with some other
    advertising programs (and frankly, I'm surprised this feature hasn't
    been implemented before—perhaps it has and I haven't come across it, but
    I suspect that isn't the case).

 2. I wanted to write to Google first, before revealing the feature, and in
    the process of writing the email, I came across—

 3. A show stopping bug!

 3. Sigh.

 3. And I haven't figured out what triggers it. Oh, it's defintely related
    to the new feature, and it causes core dumps (a seriously hard crash)
    and/or infinite loops which causes the server load to increase. Good
    news is I found a rash of entries that trigger the bug; I just haven't
    had a chance to figure out what exactly is going on.


So it may be another day or so before I can go ahead and use this feature.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/12/21.1
[2] http://httpd.apache.org/
[3] http://www.php.net/
[4] http://www.openssh.org/
[5] http://www.ravencore.com/
[6] http://www.google.com/
[7] https://www.google.com/adsense/

Email author at [email protected]

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