hoffies blog

The big webserver change is almost done as well. In fact, all active sites have been migrated, some old accounts have been killed and both (internal…) tracs are still not working because of a “strangeness” (bug?) in lighttpd-1.5 regarding PATH_INFO and maybe SCRIPT_(FILE)NAME.

So, lighttpd-1.5 is serving you this page right now and that’s what i wanted. :p

Yesterday I wanted to set up mailman… and have still not been able to get it working. This server is completely messed up. I’m running SysCP (patched for lighty support) and now I realize that it’s overkill for me. I have 7 “customers” in SysCP while 5 of them are mine… I have absolutely nothing against SysCP, it’s a nice tool for webhosting, but for me it has just become annoying. The lighty config file with my custom changes grows and grows and it will probably be longer than the automatically generated one by SysCP once… that doesn’t make sense. The only reason which made me keep using SysCP was the mail setup (postfix + courier-imap using mysql) because I hardly had any knowledge about it. I don’t claim to have much more now but I think I will try to replace courier-imap by dovecot and start a postfix config from scratch. Additionally I’ll kill lighty-1.4 and replace it by lighty-1.5 with external spawned fastcgi servers.

So, if any services on this server do not work in the next hours/days, don’t be surprised. :)

Maybe I can get a working mailman setup then…

After some hours of trying to get $PHYSICAL[“path”] working on lighttpd-1.4.13, I realized that the code for it never worked. Even not in lighttpd-1.5. May be it worked for other persons, but for me it always fails. Of course I reported that (in fact, I was annoying everyone on #lighttpd with my thoughts while debugging :p) and.. well.. probably a pretty big change is necessary to make it work, and this change may even not go into 1.4 anymore. Another not very nice thing is, that url.rewrite would not work in a $PHYSICAL[“path”] conditional (the same as for $HTTP[“url”] and maybe others). Luckily, this is probably solved by said “big change”.

What does it mean, especially for lighttpd-padeprops? I will delay it, it’s pretty useless atm. The svn will remain public of course….

lighttpd is a really nice webserver, but many people don’t find it useful for their purposes (often web hosting) because it doesn’t support per-directory configs. padeprops means “path-dependent properties” and is a tool which scans for such per-directory config files for lighttpd, similar to Apache’s .htaccess files, and should finally solve that issue (at least as long as you do not need files which change the behaviour of the web server immediately).

Finally I also got interested in testing a lighttpd 1.5 snapshot… I did some benchmarks as described on the benchmark page at lighttpd.net

As you can see at the timeline in lighttpd’s trac, lighttpd (1.5) now supports a $PHYSICAL[“path”] conditional. And this is very useful, especially for automaticly generated config files like in SysCP or an external lighttpd directory-level config parser (I have concrete ideas for it and started even implementing it a while ago, but I don’t know when there’ll be a first working version. I don’t know if someone beside me is interested in such a daemon/program, so let me know if you like the idea).

The patch (extracted from svn) also applies to the 1.4 branch.

lighttpd-1.4.13-r1 is finally in the tree \o/ Of course with graceful restart feature.

Until yesterday there was only lighttpd 1.4.11 in the tree, but now 1.4.13 is finally there (pmasked though)! \o/ ...and lua-5.1.1 i’s out of pmask.

Maybe there will even be support for graceful restart soon.