Barfoo.org on BAFM

Weird lighttpd troubles

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:51:30 +0000

Well, since about a week or so I keep having troubles with my vHost and lighttpd. The point being, after some time (up till now it’s been something between days and minutes) lighttpd completely freezes and doesn’t serve no content anymore. I don’t know if this is related to PHP (might be, I did perform an update to dev-lang/php-5.2.9-r2 on Thu May 28 12:18:57 2009), but I have to figure this out since the restart cron-job is getting annoying.

Lighttpd troubles resolved

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:50:47 +0000

Well, after last weeks lighttpd troubles with PHP (or was it without ?), they finally seem resolved. First thing I did, was upgrade to the new php-version (5.2.10). After that, I ran revdep-rebuild, which apparently found issues with lighttpd being linked to a wrong pcre-version. After remerging lighttpd the issues seem to be gone!

Well, guess I was to quick in saying the problem was resolved .. it’s still there, just not happening as fast as it would in the past ….

Lighttpd issues

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:47:28 +0000

At first, it seemed that my lighttpd issues were resolved by updating PHP/remerging lighttpd. But apparently not. After putting in a crontab entry, that restarts lighttpd every 15 minutes (which completely sucks), the issue was minimized in it’s impact but not really solved.

`1`	`/15 * * * root /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart &>/dev/null`

Thanks to Michél (I guess, again) – who helped me looking at the strace logs, and of course Christian (aka hoffie – one of my old Gentoo buddies), the issue seems finally resolved. It turns out it was neither a PHP nor lighttpd issue. It was a simple matter of (stale) symlinks in /etc/ssl/certs if you can imagine that. Apparently a stale symlink forced PHP into a loop or something, from which it couldn’t recover on it’s own.

Setting up a phpMyAdmin auto-update

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 19:20:11 +0000

Well, just like everybody else, I’ve been using phpMyAdmin to do my casual MySQL fixing/work on this website. However, recently the phpMyAdmin developers switched to Git on SourceForge and then to GitHub shortly after that.

So, the guy over at Network Jack wrote down what I had already been doing:

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git clone --depth=1 git://phpmyadmin.git.sf.net/gitroot/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
cd phpmyadmin
git checkout --track -b PMASTABLE origin/STABLE

However, as I said before, they switched from SourceForge to GitHub, thus you need another URL.

Recent downtime

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:01:40 +0000

Well, you might have noticed that barfoo.org hasn’t been available for the last week or so … I had to change the DNS provider (thanks at this point again to Bene from xnull.de for putting me up as long as he did).

Sadly my new provider, when purchasing the domain hosting, doesn’t allow sub-domains. So after opening a service ticket with them, they switched me into a webhosting contract which allows sub-domains (wtf…).

Blog is back!

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:39:57 +0000

As you can see, the blog is finally back! I haven’t been visiting the blog on a daily basis (actually, I haven’t been here for some time), so it apparently took me ten days to figure that the wp_posts table of my wordpress installation was marked as crashed.

To repair that, I had to take down the MySQL instance and use myisamchk on the .MYI file. Once again, it’s back now, only one draft has disappeared into thin air (well, that ain’t so bad), but that’s a minor loss.

My neverending lighttpd troubles

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:31:13 +0000

Well, after a day or so my lighttpd troubles reappeared. But this time, the lighttpd process would simply put out this:

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(mod_fastcgi.c.2913) backend is overloaded; we'll disable it for 2 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 131
(mod_fastcgi.c.2668) fcgi-server re-enabled: 0 /var/run/lighttpd/lighttpd-fastcgi-php-17242.socket
(mod_fastcgi.c.2913) backend is overloaded; we'll disable it for 2 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 131
(mod_fastcgi.c.2668) fcgi-server re-enabled: 0 /var/run/lighttpd/lighttpd-fastcgi-php-17242.socket

And as the message says, PHP (or rather mod_fastcgi?) would simply stop to process requests. In the end, I tuned some of the lighttpd/mod_fastcgi parameters.