We had a big storm last week, so I took the downspout to my rain barrel and put it in my fish tank…. I got about 150 gallons, but now I can’t paint it until I get the water pumped to the sumps, so I better get the sumps levelled and plumbed quickly!

The growbed/sump that had glue in it I gave a once-over with the Simple Green as well, followed by some Comet…  I figure if that is not enough, nothing reasonable will be.   Worst case, I can exclude that GB/sump from the system.  I’ll try putting some water in it and monitoring the pH change to see what happens.

To add private CA certs to your iPhone or iPad, you will need:

• The iPhone Configuration Utility (windows or mac)
• Your iPhone or iPad physically connected via cable to said windows or mac machine.  It’s tempting to try to add the resulting .mobileconfig by downloading it wirelessly over a browser, but it will not be trusted.
• The cert file(s)

Once the above requirements are met, do the following:

1. Start the iPhone Configuration Utility.
2. Under “Library”, select “Configuration Profiles”
3. Click the Add New button on the top left.
4. Fill out the mandatory general information tab contents
5. Under the Credentials section, add the CA cert or certs.
6. Attach your iOS device if it is not already connected.
7. Select your device in the iPhone Configuration Utility, and select its Configuration Profiles tab.
8. You should see the profile you just created with an “install” button on the right – click it.
9. On your device, you will see a profile installation dialog – hit the install button and follow directions.

That’s all, the CA profile should be installed and verified with a geen check.   I hope this helps some of you out there.

This process can also be used to install client SSL certs on the iPad.

That’s all I can say about two of the IBCs.   Two growbed/sumps are just fine, cleaned up now.  The other growbed/sump used to have glue in it, it turns out.  See the picture below – I ended up using the pressure washer at its highest setting and it was able to get the big parts out.  After it dries out a bit, I may try sandpaper to see if it can get rid of the remaining glue bumps.   The fish tank is a little different – rather than glue, it seems to be some sort of greasy gunk that does not seem to go away  – there’s still a film on the inside.   I may try the bleach and hot water approach that I’ve heard suggested as a good general approach…  or I may look for a strong degreaser.

Back on the lawn, I measured three of the four for 16 inch deep growbeds – a little deeper than most I’ve seen, but done at the recommendation of Rick Op, who advises that the maintenance will be less with deeper beds – I’m all about low maintenance once it’s set up!   (Rick wanted me to make them even deeper.)  I cut them and also the top out of the fourth for the fish tank.   You can see a pic of one in the cut cage as an idea of what it looks like in the end.

As light began to fall, I fired up the pressure washer and started cleaning the grime off.   Fairly successful, although I was pretty disappointed to see that one of the growbed IBCs seemed to have glue in it – not budging at the moment.   I’ve read about one person’s trials with an IBC that had wood glue in his that he did not clean out – it sent the pH way up in the beginning for a while, which makes it hard to get the beneficial bacteria started.   I’ll see about what I can do to clean that one better tomorrow.   The others cleaned out really nicely and are ready for sanding and painting.

First is a little odd, but the narrow alley between my garage and the neighbor gets the most consistent sunlight, at least where an elevated growbed would be.   The down side is that I’d have to put in gutters as well, which would add to the cost.

The second place, which is where my wife would want it, is around the north side of the house where the old play fort is.    During the summer, sun shines well close to the fence.  The down side here is that, especially during winter, no direct sunlight reaches the area.   A little further out into the yard might work.  We’ll see…

This is bad because, while I have a caching reverse proxy in the cloud, all dynamic parts of my websites are hosted on my home server. Particularly, my wife’s photography business that is taking off was not able to serve clients. Groan. Maybe I should bite the bullet and beef up the memory of the cloud server. “Next to nothing” costs for my current cloud server profile times two (as a result of doubling the memory) I guess would be “near nothing” costs….

At any rate, while considering all this, I had the downed connection to deal with. The standard reboot the cable modem deal did not solve the problem like it had in the past. Since my neighbor had Internet, a call to Comcrap was in order. The tech, Jeremy, was actually pretty nice, but after a while said he would have to call me back. Oh well.

While I was waiting for the callback, I figured now was the perfect time to install the new $22 5 Port Gigabit switch that I had bought from Fry’s, and move the WRT54G to the side to just serve wifi clients. My servers and desktop will like being able to talk to each other fast! I did so, rearranging the wires and all that, and cleaned things up a bit. Things were nice and fast now between my main server and my Untangle home gateway. Happy! Ten Times faster.

Comcrap called back saying things should work now, but had me unplug the cable modem for a few minutes before plugging it back in. I was testing directly with my laptop connected to it (I know, bad, as the average PC is hacked in 32 seonds or some such when unprotected facing the net!), and the connection worked.

The other thing I wanted to address with Comcrap was what my speed should be looking like. I had tested it the other day with speedtest.net and gotten only 1.4 Mb down and 0.3 Mb up, whereas my neighbor was getting 30 down and 5 up! I went to speedtest again to give Jeremy the results, and lo and behold, I was getting 33 Mb down! Wow! I wondered what they had fixed. Happily, I thanked him for his help and let him go.

Now putting all back together with the Untangle server as the gateway, I tested again… UGH – back to 1.4 Mb downloads. I got the same when testing from my server. This meant only one thing – that Untangle must be causing the problem. I went to the Untangle server and disabled the spam, virus, phish, and attack sensors, and also the web filtering, openvpn, and even firewall, leaving it pretty much as a router with no blocks. STILL 1.4 Mb down. UGH.

Poking around in the networking config, I saw the advanced link hiding in the corner, and sure enough, in there was the QoS – Quality of Service – section. Memories came back – I had set QoS a long time ago to prevent certain clients on the internal network from hogging too much bandwidth (Ok, teenagers downloading movies). The thing with this is, QoS asks you to tell it what your download and upload speeds are, which back then were 1.5 down and 0.367 up. By setting these, QoS knows what rates to throttle the connections back to. The down side was that QoS now effectively imposed its own cap on ALL traffic based on what I had told it, and as Comcrap updated service over the years, I never saw it.

Lesson learned: either don’t use QoS or remember to update your settings with accurate download/upload throughput speeds! Otherwise you will be capping your access un-necessarily.

ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/ stickysession=BALANCEID
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:71/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:72/
<Proxy balancer://mycluster>
 BalancerMember http://localhost:71 route=server1
 BalancerMember http://localhost:72 route=server2
</Proxy> 

Now there’s the issue of the client cookie being set. What if you are load balancing a third party app or webserver and can’t easily get the cookie set on the client? No problem! While it didn’t work in 2.2.3 (in particular, the BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED var being set), when I tried in 2.2.11, I was able to set the cookie myself based on which balancer member was selected:

# Set session cookie if BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED, containing BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE env variable, which is set to the route above
# Note that cookie value should be a session id, followed by a period, followed by the route.
# Since session id cookie usually not advised to be mutable, best create own cookie with anything you want
# for the session part, just make sure to have a period and route part last
### Used for setting cookie LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
Header add Set-Cookie "BALANCEID=balancer.%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e; path=/;" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED
# Just give some debug info in the header, don't use once you have it working
Header add X-Var "BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED=%{BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED}e" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED
Header add X-Var "BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE=%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e" env=BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE
Header add X-Var "BALANCER_SESSION_ROUTE=%{BALANCER_SESSION_ROUTE}e" env=BALANCER_SESSION_ROUTE 

Presto! Session persistence, all handled at the reverse proxy load balancer level.

The following belongs in your SSL VirtualHost:

# if the SSL key does not contain 3 characters
RewriteCond %{SSL:SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE}  <128
# AND there were some arguments in the URL (it was followed by ?something)
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .
# Redirect to lowcrypt, passing the requested URL as an argument with the
# original args (QUERY_STRING) intact
RewriteRule .*  http://lowcrypt.gatech.edu/index.php?https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI}?%{QUERY_STRING} [R,NE,L]

# if the key does not contain 3 characters
RewriteCond %{SSL:SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE} <128
# Redirect to lowcrypt, passing the requested URL as an argument
RewriteRule .*  http://lowcrypt.gatech.edu/index.php?https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,NE,L]

# You can tweak this to your liking, but here is a rather permissive example
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv3:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL

Note that to test this with firefox, I had to do the following to allow weak ciphers and disable strong ones:

1. Point the Firefox browser to, “about:config”
2. For filter, enter “ssl”
3. Disable SSL v3 by setting "security.enable_ssl3 = false"
4. Enable SSL v2 by setting "security.enable_ssl2 = true"
5. I found that I had to go in and actually enable an SSL V2 cipher as well: "security.ssl2.rc2_40 = true"

Works great!

    RewriteEngine On
    # Start redirecting after this datetime
    RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY}%{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} >200904040900
    # Don't redirect certain paths
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/webservices
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/backdoor
    # Don't redirect if backdoor cookie is active
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !backdoor
    # Do the rewrite
    RewriteRule .* http://mynewhostname/ [R,L]

    # Allow back door access to old site (this site) - hit /backdoor and they get a cookie for
    # 15 mins such that they won't be redirected while it is active.
    RewriteRule ^/backdoor http://myoldhostname/ [CO=backdoor:yes:myoldhostname:15:/]

I would LOVE to form a company implementing these or similar monitoring tools. I’ve done this a lot at work, and a little bit on the side for a few friends and their companies.

I’ve been looking around, and it seems that in addition to Nagios, two other contenders are Zenoss and Cacti. I’ve heard good things about Zenoss, specifically how it is easier to set up than Nagios. I think I may check it out, though I am a fan of Nagios’s flexibility.

 # Take any mixed or uppercase ticker and set to lower
 RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
 RewriteRule ^(/[A-Z]...?)$ ${lowercase:$1} [R,L]
 RewriteRule ^(/.[A-Z]..?)$ ${lowercase:$1} [R,L]
 RewriteRule ^(/..[A-Z].?)$ ${lowercase:$1} [R,L]
 RewriteRule ^(/...[A-Z])$ ${lowercase:$1} [R,L] 

This case conversion will be true for any 3 or 4 char URI with an uppercase letter. (It would probably be better to replace the “.” above with [a-zA-Z], as it’s likely intended for only chars to replace. Above will transform /a/BB as well, which is probably not desired.)

I had the misfortune of walking into a gift shop with a confectionery, and thus walked out with two pieces of peanut butter fudge. Sitting on the bench in the cool afternoon tasting the peanutty treat with the sun on my face really made my day.

I got back to the courtroom with 30 minutes to spare, and I noticed that the jury chairs are nice, padded, blue leather chairs. Did I mention that they recline? I’m dead meat after lunch if I am on the jury!

I wonder if it’s OK to have a margarita with lunch? Needless to say, I didn’t get selected, so I won’t get the opportunity… It’s probably also not a good idea to do so during jury days, but having one on the jury selection day can’t hurt! Just don’t get sloshed. *wink wink*

Interesting note: they pay $40 / day if you are selected on the jury, but not for the jury selection. I guess that’s sort of the consolation prize for those who have to return the next day.

1. Make a directory on your desktop called DeleteIn2Weeks. In my case, the full path was /home/guytonw/Desktop/DeleteIn2Weeks
2. Create the following cron entries:
0 1 * * * find /home/guytonw/Desktop/DeleteIn2Weeks -mtime +14 -type f -exec echo Deleting {} \;
1 1 * * * find /home/guytonw/Desktop/DeleteIn2Weeks -mtime +14 -type f -exec rm {} \;

This is nice because any files put in there will automatically be swept away after a sufficient amount of time. (Hopefully I won’t need the backup after 2 weeks’ time!)

The main reason I started playing was because I did not want to buy a new laptop to play some of the newer games. One day I’ll break down, but it’s not necessary just yet… At any rate, it’s a lot of fun playing online!

package AjaxTest;

use CGI;
use CGI::Ajax;

use Apache2::RequestRec();
use Apache2::RequestIO();
use Apache2::Const -compile => qw(OK);

sub handler {
    my ($r) = @_;

    my $cgi = new CGI;  # had this outside the handler and was getting segfaults

    # Have to redefine $0 for CGI::Ajax because it's used to call further URLs from
    # javascript ajax functions.  (otherwise it did "httpd?"...)
    local $0 = $ENV{"REQUEST_URI"};
    $0 =~ s/?.*//;

    # Start Ajax stuff
    my $pjx = new CGI::Ajax("test_ajax" => &test_ajax);
    # Don't compress javascript (1 for user fcns only, 2 for all)
    $pjx->JSDEBUG(1);
    # Send stderr to web logs
    $pjx->DEBUG(1);

    print $pjx->build_html( $cgi, &base_page);
    return Apache2::Const::OK;
}

sub base_page {
    return "Ajax mod_perl testmod_perl 2.0.2 on apache 2.2.2 rocks! <p><div id="test">Change me</div><p>nn";
}

sub test_ajax {
    my $time = time();
    return "Test successful; $time<p>";
}

1;