Escape from boredom

I did get the error code

svn: E175013 – SVN “access to … is forbidden”

today. Restarted SVN-services, problem solved. Hard to understand, but the error is really just saying “Cannot connect”. Wonder why it cannot say that, instead of “access to…”.

…but found a tip here social.technet.microsoft.com/…/outlook-2013-ui-is-not-good One of the comments, which made it a bit better

1. Set Theme to Dark Gray (it’s better than the default)
2. Click the View tab, Other Settings, change Grid Line Style to Solid (helps separate the emails)
3. Click the View tab, Conditional Formatting, Click Unread Messages, the click Font, change Font Style to Bold (helps identify new emails quickly)

Have previously struggled with the performance of site loading on my blog, always suspected that the problem was related to the database, but not really sure. But every time I have planned to find this out the problem has gone away, but lately the performance has been bad constantly. So off to Google, found the article about debugging B2Evolution http://manual.b2evolution.net/Debugging. First run, sloooooow, after that everything fast as lightning. Why did the problem go away? Beats me, suspect some MySQL-caching on the server, but must admit that I am guessing – honestly: I have no idea…but…debugging once helped somehow.

As a backup if I for some reason would be locked out of my personal email account I usually configure various accounts with my corporate email as backup. So if all other fails, I still should be able to log on to the service, this time it was Facebook. No issue doing it I thought, since I only had configured my corporate address to be secondary backup. Other than that my Facebook wall is as restricted as it can be.

So then, on Friday my boss, which is not one of my friends on Facebook, told me that he had installed the latest version of the Outlook email client (2013). He also told me that my profile picture was taken from my FB-account, me as a sergeant in the army. That is one thing, since the profile picture is publicly available, but what was worse was that he also could see everything posted on my wall. Again, my wall is as limited as it can be, but not if you are accessing it using latest Outlook (guessing that you must be part of the same company, but hey…if you are working for WallMart the number of fellow employees are 2.1 million.

I easily removed this option by deleting my secondary email on FB…but, fu#¤ – how could I know? Anyhow, it just confirms the rules of social media (FB and others)

To protect yourself, there are certain things you should refrain from posting on your Facebook profile. This includes comments and gripes about your employer or co-workers. Think twice before going on a Facebook to rant about your religious and political convictions. Your convictions may offend a potential employer and result in you not getting a job. You should also be careful when posting pictures. There is always the chance that an employer may see your post. As a rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t want your boss to see it, don’t put it on Facebook.

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After weeks of downtime my blog is finally up and running again. Single most important reason for the downtime was the hacker attack against the Linux servers hosted by my ISP, read more about it here iktnytt.no/problemer-….-servere-har-problemer/ (In Norwegian). Then, due to my summer vacation I have not been able to follow up needed steps to recover until today. Seems to be some more issues as well, performance is pretty bad, but I expect that to be caused by overall server load, expect it to improve over the next few days.

Needed to search an access.log file from Apache where each line started with an ip-address. Due to a limitation in AWstats, see bityard.org/…/apache_awstats_x-forwarded-for I did have to update the current log file (and later update httpd.conf to get rid of difference in # of fields)

Anyhow, in order to get a workaround I needed to add the missing hyphen ‘-‘ for all requests that does not use the load balancer. Pretty simple, many blog posts on how to do it, e.g stackoverflow.com/…/using-regex-to-prefix-and-append-in-notepad. To append, use \1 (and \2 etc if needed). My regex expression was

^(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}\s-

Confirmed by using http://gskinner.com/RegExr/.
Problem was that the ‘\1’ did not work…until I RTFM. I needed to add a parenthesis to create a collection so that Notepad++ (Or more correct the Regex-engine knew what I refer to when using ‘\n’).

(^(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}\s-)

Smooth and easy as always, now running 4.1.7, mainly a security patch.

I started to get preeettyyy annoyed by the bad performance of my blog. Did some research and decided just give the two lines a try in the .htaccess file

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE 

And, damn! It seems to work immediately and provide a major performance improvement. Why have I not done this before?

@Update:

Also added

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
       ExpiresActive On
       ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
       ExpiresByType text/css        "access plus 1 month"
       ExpiresByType image/gif       "access plus 1 month"
       ExpiresByType image/png       "access plus 1 month"
       ExpiresByType image/jpeg      "access plus 1 month"

       # Now we have Expires: headers, ETags are unecessary and only slow things down:
       FileETag None
</IfModule>

Just now I still have some performance issues, but I suspect that to be caused by the database server struggling, not the web server.

I was not aware of this tool, the SnippingTool. After spending years using MsPaint when taking screenshots, I have now turned advanced.

While reviewing a SystemOut.log-file created by WebSphere I needed to remove all lines containing “SystemOut”. Luckily I have installed Cygwin, so Perl to the rescue. Found this Q&A at StackOverflow.

Ended up with

perl -ni.bak -e 'print unless m!^.*SystemOut.*!' SystemOut.log

Original file > 80.000 lines, resultfile 195 lines…a bit easier to read…