andrewtweber - Developer IT

Any reason not to buy SSL certificates from a reseller?

- by andrewtweber

Is there any reason to buy an SSL certificate directly from the host (for $49, for example), instead of through a well-known reseller, for only $10.95? Specifically in my case, I just need to encrypt user data as they fill out forms. Nothing too critical, only usernames and passwords. I don't think my users actually care about the brand name or "trust" level behind the certificate, I'm just looking out for them.

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Book recommendation/advice for a future CTO? [closed]

- by andrewtweber

I'm the current lead developer for a small start-up. I spend the majority of my time coding, while the remainder is split between recruiting more programmers and managing the one I do work with. We just hired two more developers and are waiting to hear back from a third. I have about a month to prepare before they start. Any good book recommendations on developing my leadership skills, especially tech-related? Or advice from those who have been in this situation? Note: I'm less than a year out of college. Fortunately (for me), all of the new hires are younger than I.

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Apache taking up too much CPU

- by andrewtweber

I'm trying to manage a server on Amazon for a network of sites that receives about 100 million pageviews per month. Unfortunately, nobody out of my team of 5 developers has much server admin experience. Right now we have the MaxClients set to 1400. Currently our traffic is about average, and we have 1150 total Apache processes running, which use about 2% CPU each! Out of those 1150, 800 of them are currently sleeping, but still taking up CPU. I'm sure there are ways to optimize this. I have a few thoughts: It appears Apache is creating a new process for every single connection. Is this normal? Is there a way to more quickly kill the sleeping processes? Should we turn KeepAlive on? Each page loads about 15-20 medium-sized graphics and a lot of javascript/css. So, here's our Apache setup. We do plan on contracting a server admin asap, but I would really appreciate some advice until we can find someone. Timeout 25 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 200 KeepAliveTimeout 5 <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 100 MinSpareServers 20 MaxSpareServers 50 ServerLimit 1400 MaxClients 1400 MaxRequestsPerChild 5000 </IfModule> <IfModule worker.c> StartServers 4 MaxClients 400 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> Full top output: top - 23:44:36 up 1 day, 6:43, 4 users, load average: 379.14, 379.17, 377.22 Tasks: 1153 total, 379 running, 774 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 71.9%us, 26.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.9%si, 0.0%st Mem: 70343000k total, 23768448k used, 46574552k free, 527376k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 10054596k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1756 mysql 20 0 10.2g 1.8g 5256 S 19.8 2.7 904:41.13 mysqld 21515 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4512 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.42 httpd 21524 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4032 R 2.1 0.0 0:32.63 httpd 21544 apache 20 0 394m 16m 4084 R 2.1 0.0 0:36.38 httpd 21643 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4360 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.20 httpd 21817 apache 20 0 396m 17m 4064 R 2.1 0.0 0:38.22 httpd 22134 apache 20 0 395m 17m 4584 R 2.1 0.0 0:35.62 httpd 22211 apache 20 0 397m 18m 4104 R 2.1 0.0 0:29.91 httpd 22267 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4636 R 2.1 0.0 0:35.29 httpd 22334 apache 20 0 397m 18m 4096 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.86 httpd 22549 apache 20 0 395m 17m 4056 R 2.1 0.0 0:31.01 httpd 22612 apache 20 0 397m 19m 4152 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.34 httpd 22721 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:32.76 httpd 22932 apache 20 0 396m 17m 4020 R 2.1 0.0 0:37.34 httpd 22933 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.77 httpd 22949 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.61 httpd 22956 apache 20 0 402m 24m 4072 R 2.1 0.0 0:41.45 httpd

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Ruby on Rails (Redmine) on Apache - 503 Error

- by andrewtweber

I am running a Ruby on Rails application called Redmine. It's been working fine, but today it's giving a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error. (It was initially set up by an employee who is now gone.) I check the error log and it says: [Mon Nov 21 11:03:30 2011] [error] (111)Connection refused: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:3000 (127.0.0.1) failed [Mon Nov 21 11:03:30 2011] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (127.0.0.1) Here's a chunk of my Apache config <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName redmine.{domain}.com RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://redminecluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L] </VirtualHost> <Proxy balancer://redminecluster> BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3000 </Proxy> I found this link: http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/20561 which suggests I simply need to "start the redmine server." I've tried /etc/init.d/redmine start which gives me this output => Booting Mongrel => Rails 2.3.11 application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000 The contents of /etc/init.d/redmine: cd /var/redmine sudo ruby script/server -d -e production One thing I immediately notice is that it says 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1. In addition, running top or ps -ef shows no record of a "mongrel" or "redmine" process. I've also tried restarting Apache before and after starting redmine. Not sure where to go from here.

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cURL looking for CA in the wrong place

- by andrewtweber

On Redhat Linux, in a PHP script I am setting cURL options as such: curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, True); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '/home/andrew/share/cacert.pem'); Yet I am getting this exception when trying to send data (curl error: 77) error setting certificate verify locations: CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt CApath: none Why is it looking for the CAfile in /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt? I don't know where this folder is coming from as I don't set it anywhere. Shouldn't it be looking in the place I specified, /home/andrew/share/cacert.pem? I don't have write permission /etc/ so simply copying the file there is not an option. Am I missing some other curl option that I should be using? (This is on shared hosting - is it possible that it's disallowing me from setting a different path for the CAfile?)

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