Lighttpd 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.

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.

Firefox: Hosting Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) on lighttpd

Sun, 03 May 2009 14:30:58 +0000

Well, I am an enthusiastic user of Xmarks (or Foxmarks) and played with this again and again. So this weekend, I finally decided to do it properly. I sat down, recreated the whole WebDAV stuff (even if I cheated of this HowtoForge article).

Always redirect traffic to HTTPS, since transmitting username and passwords via HTTP ain’t that secure (MITM)

Okay, so here are the shortended setup instructions:

Enable mod_access, mod_auth, mod_redirect and mod_webdav in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Create the necessary directories
Create the htpasswd-file
Configure the redirections

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mkdir -p /var/www/dav/{web,auth,sql}
chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd/var/www/dav/{web,sql}
htpasswd -c /var/www/dav/auth/htpasswd chrischie

Since we just created the necessary directories, as well as a htpasswd-file containing a user we should be able to change the configuration now: