Apache HTTP server and its further development

The Apache httpd is one of the most stable software pieces which is still in use. The latest huge step forward was with the release of 2.0. Quo vadis Apache httpd? The most current release is 2.2.15. During the 2.2.x release cycle, there have basically been only bug-fix releases (Okay, response header rewrite starting on 2.2.9  is a nice feature). This brings me to the question: What is going on with 2.4? The answer is quite simple: As you can ….Read More

Writing trigger scripts for cobbler does not work at the moment

At the moment, shell scripts as triggers wont work with cobbler. This is due to a bug. Unfortunately the developers wont fix it in the next few weeks or even months. Triggers are a very welcome and powerful method to automate things before, during after installation of a system. At the moment it only works with python scripts. Since not every sysadmin knows python, but everyone knows to write bash scripts, this is a major drawback. Cobbler is included in ….Read More

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released

End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More

RHEL6 as a web server

New software versions Today I’m writing about the changes and benefits of RHEL6 as a web server compared to RHEL5. Red Hat is well known for its stable API and ABI over the life-cycle of a major release. For some usage types this is a major problem. Sticking to old version of PHP, MySQL, Tomcat you-name-it-piece-of-software is problematic since web applications are rapidly changing its requirements. Instead of PHP 5.1.6, RHEL6 ships almost up-to-date PHP 5.3.1. Which is good, since ….Read More