Jacques' Brain Drain

I’m doing a bit of python work with the Django application framework, and thought a picture might be in order…

Have a good day

The Olympics on the web really annoys me. The main problem I have is that there’s no continuity. There should be, optimally, one site for the entire Olympics. That site should have information on all the modern games – going back to their reintroduction in 1896. You should not, under any circumstances need to use a list like this one to find information on past games.

I like Archive.org. I really do, don’t get me wrong – but you shouldn’t have to use it to pull up old Olympic homepages. It’s not like there has been a giant break in management here. Anyone putting in a moment’s thought would have known right away that those pages would be of enduring historical interest. So why, then, did they get junked? It’s certainly not the cost of maintaining a web presence. Practically every business, small or large, manages to do that. Realistically, the cost of maintaining these websites is insignificant compared to the other costs in running the IOC and the Olympic games.

Ultimately, I think the problem is one of foresight. Electronic media is naturally of such short duration that historic preservation is an afterthought. That’s really too bad, since it can lead us to forget our past, and without our past we can’t really tell where we’re headed with our future.

I seem to be having one of those nights where you’re down for no discernable reason, and things just don’t go well because of it. Today has mostly been dedicated to cleanup – both online and off. On the good side, I got a fair bit of housework done, and I’ve laid the groundwork for more server setup and improvement. On the downside, I feel lousy and don’t know what exactly to do about it.

Right now, the next significant project on my server agenda is to finish preparing Sekhmet to move some of my hosted sites back. I’m investigating mail server software, since I haven’t yet found anything I’m really happy with. Right now I’m using a bastard hybrid system which works, but not very well. It’s a stone bitch to maintain, and gives me hives every time I have to work on it. For this reason it’s about 90% likely that I’m going to try out something cleaner and more efficient and see if I can get something to work in a more stable way.

The major thorn in my side is mail vertual hosting. I do not want to have user accounts on the machines for each mail user. I’ve had it with that solution. I think that I’ll end up with courier backed by some kind of database – probably Mysql. Well – that’s for another day…

I spent the evening rebuilding a web server that will be running Apache 2.0.x. While doing so, I found an interesting situation with respect to the standard Apache configuration on Ubuntu 5.04. The standard configuration uses a namevirtualhost directive to set up multiple virtual servers on the machine. This is normal.  The problem is that when Apache reads the default website configuration, it does a DNS lookup, and finds the host’s fully qualified domain name (FQDN). After that, any virtual host directives that try to use that name as the ServerName just don’t work. Worse, they fail silently!!! This is not good, because they cause the box to send the ugly default Apache page instead of my beautifully hand-crafted html.
The easy workaround is to put a ServerName directive into the default site setup which goes to nowhere in particular (I used nowhere.jricher.com). This avoids the reverse DNS lookup, and then the virtualhost section for the server’s hostname works just fine.

What is really annoying is that I couldn’t find a decent article on debugging Apache virtual host setups. If there had been a single one-liner in the Apache virtual host docs which mentioned the use of apache2ctl -S I would probably have saved myself several hours of trouble.

Note for the unwise:

apachectl (apache2ctl on Ubuntu, Debian, and some others) can be convinced to dump the virtual host setup for the box by using the “-S” option. It’s not documented anywhere. I got the command option from a guy on IRC who was helping me debug this mess. Remember, for apache virtual host trouble use “apachectl -S”. End sermon…