Andrew Sawyers - SawBlog

Zope is not known for it’s good documentation, but this Plone manual seems to be well written and can be generally useful for someone wishing to develop for Zope without Plone. Thanks to the Plone community for their continued good work.
plone.org/documentation/manual/developer-manual

…the world’s lost it’s collective mind. I tend to think the later. How is this possible Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe the Nobel Piece prize: Piece of my pie! Piece of my paycheck. What a joke. This joker hasn’t done anything (*really*)….except push liberal welfare state mentality. Empowerment doesn’t equate to liberal social programs people. Empowerment isn’t another man having more power over you. Empowerment is being ABLE to do something for oneself. DO something; do something local in your community. Refuse the handouts. Refuse the welfare state. Take the power back into your own hands and make your neighbors strong.

Warning to anyone considering purchasing from shopnbc.com, much of their business is redirected through a company called MyAtMarkets - via a rebranded site called AT Auctions. It’s completely not clear that you’ve been redirected to another company as the domain and feel of the site leads customers to believe one is still shoping with shopnbc.com. If you purchase anything from these folks, the warranty will actually cost you excessively, with fees to process, assess, handle and ship your product back to you. Their defective products once sold to you are only under warranty if you pay. I would never recommend neither of these companys; shopnbc claims they’re not responsible since they are not the *actual* company who sold the item. They just rebrand and present the other company as themself. The MyAtMarkets say, “pay or don’t we don’t care….” They have your money….so be warned.

SCAMMERS.

Well, planning our wedding should be *fun*, shouldn’t it? Hell if I know…doesn’t matter; I think eloping in Vegas is a sensible option - and I’m not even within spitting distance of the date. So, what’s going on with me…well, I’m thinking I’m going to do the music for the wedding reception myself. Sure, yeah yeah, I need to save a couple bucks where I can - but I also am figuring it’s not like the most crucial role. It’s not like skipping over the pastor. It’s not like having MickeyD’s for food, innit?

So, with a little planning and ingenuity I figure I can create some play lists for the various aspects of the reception - and then just teach a couple of the relatives how to add songs to a play list. I’m going to buy a shite load of music (gotta love soundike).

Seriously, how can it go wrong? A myriad of ways I imagine.

So, my little plan is basically to build a library of top dance hits and then just collect a bunch of the songs from the lists…..I’ve already got some great swing and early Jazz that’ll be really fun as well…..I mean, when I crank up Pantera and D.R.I no one is going to be dancing anyhow….so I really only need a few filler songs until the bride passes out and the in-laws bore of me!

Ok, ok, ok - all joking aside. No Pantera or D.R.I. - I mean, how can I explain a song called “I’d rather be sleeping” is just a joke? So back to the task at hand. Collecitng a list of great (and fun) dance songs…..

So where am I going to get the top lists from? Well….that remains to be seen.

No matter what anyone thinks about the election results, there’s one great thing to celebrate. The end of Bush’s failed regime. I hope Obama rises to the occasion. Let’s see if he’s sold his soul to get where he’s at or if he truly is there for America and Americans. I have hope…..only time will tell. We can likely rest assured that he’s not sold his soul to the same people Bush had……

Cheers Obama!

A windowglass
you on the far side,
and my own face
semi-reflected there
where light and surface share.
This is how we slide
one into another;
this superposition of faces.
The connection of lovers
is a union of graces
as in prayer.
The eye that frees itself.
There
is only one face in the glass.

Jon Cavala (Land of the Headless)

If you’re one to dole out some cash to help others in need over the holiday season, consider giving to these 3 blokes sitting in prison. The West Memphis Three have been sitting in prison for ~15 years for crimes they did not commit, one on death row. I’ve been watching the progress of their case for years now, hoping to see some justice for these 3 guys. Thankfully new evidence will finally exonerate them. I originally learned of their case from an HBO movie, Paradise Lost. Unfortunately I wasn’t surprised at the ignorance which convicted these poor fellas.; it’s rampant - not not limited to just America. Over the years, there has been lots of support for freeing these guys by musicians, doing benefit concerts and contributing to their legal fund. If you’re in the giving spirit this holiday season, this is a good cause to consider. Drop them a 20 or 50 spot via pay pal for LDavis11@hotmail.com or you can send them a check here:

Damien Echols Defense Fund
PO Box 1216
Little Rock, AR 72203

This case is yet another shining example why the rest of the US needs to step up and stop executing people. Way to go `Jersey!

Dear Mr. Gore,
Let me say upfront, I’ve never called myself a Democrat. In recent years, I’ve not called myself a Republican either - go figure. I do think I’m a Republican: a fiscal conservative. No, not a neo-Republican, worrying about social conservatism; that’s really a contradiction to the party IMNSHO. To be honest, I wouldn’t have voted for you when you first ran against Bush. Not because I liked Bush. Not because I didn’t like you. I *think* ‘we’ (me) didn’t know you. Not sure if I do much more now, but I saw your show - and was able to see you as a fellow human; someone who cares of bigger things - more then himself, more then how he might increase the wealth of his wealthy constituents. I dread our options: Hillary, the cardboard facade of change. Who could the GOP offer up for slaughter that’s anything more then a sacrifice?

Please, just run for President.

Having recently noticed some odd behavior with Apache 2.2.4 when examining my apache logs. I noticed an odd number of HTTP 400 errors. Surprisingly, these errors were being generated by my own server - i.e. the IP address of my apache server was issuing the request.

How odd.

The first thing which crossed my mind was someone was trying (or had) exploited my server. I was satisfied that everything was fine; I had recently updated my LAMP setup and checked against rootkits and known exploits. I was annoyed; it was time to try and trace this condition.

After checking against exploits, the first thing to do was check and recheck the apache config files. Using a large number of rewrite rules and custom log format, those were the obvious initial candidates.

My custom log format:
"%h %{%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S %z}t %D \"%r\" %>s %I %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\" %{Location}o"

Normal requests show up in the log as follows:
74.8.28.132 21/08/2007 04:42:17 +0100 172 "GET /sawblog/ HTTP/1.0" 200 563 32500 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv;1.8.1.4) Geck/20070603 Fedora/2.0.0.4-2.fc7 Firefox.2.0.0.4" www.plope.com/

These Bad Requests look like follows:
64.34.177.88 21/08/2007 04:42:17 +0100 122 "GET /" 400 11 550 "-" "-" -

Since the first thought was the RewriteRules were causing this; I tried to provoke the bad request myself. Crawling various parts of my site, I’d hoped I would find a bad Rewrite rule. Life (and computers) are never so easy. I found I was unable to provoke the condition. I began to think I wasn’t even on the right track.

What else could it be? Monitoring (nagios)? I’d used nagios for years and I’d never seen this problem. It couldn’t see how that could be the cause. I could see the nagios request being logged with the expected 200 response in the logs. Not worth further consideration.

I had recently began playing withcacti and graphing again. This did not make much sense either; all graphing was being done by external scripts I wrote - and I wasn’t hitting the http server directly. Logic continued to point to a bad rewrite somehow casing a request to be proxied incorrectly to the local apache server instead of one of my back-end applications. This made sense to be the culprit. Go with it.

As a last resort I figured I would jump on #apache on irc and see if anyone there might have seen this or confirm it could be a Rewrite rule causing it. Unfortunately the Apache IRC channel didn’t offer much help. Outside the obvious, no one offered up any insight that I couldn’t deduce on my own. I had hoped someone had experienced this condition or knew if a fudged RewriteRule could be the cause. The general consensus on #apache was it would be awfully difficult to fudge a rewrite rule to cause what I was seeing. Unfortunately, #apache wasn’t much use.

The condition proved to be more of an annoyance then an actual problem (no URL I could find actually resulted in an error raised to users). I just noodled over the issue for awhile. Over this past weekend, I decided I would crawl the site and then ramp up some load against server. Just see if I could provoke the condition once again.

Pointing a load utility against the site and ramping up the load was unable to provoke it (at first). Running for a substantial period of time, there were no 400 errors being logged. Frustrated, I quit my load test. Low and behold, nearly immediately I had logged several bad requests. How could that be? At least, I had something to go on: Quiting my load test in mid-stream resulted in a number of bad requests.

Interesting.

With that in mind, I reran some load and quit the test, duplicating the bad requests being logged. Excellent, reproducible condition. Like anyone, I loathe the unreproducible error. Lord knows, I get enough of those from the users of my apps….

I have apache running the prefork MPM module. So, what appears to be happening is during load, apache increases the number of servers to handle requests. As soon as the load subsides, apache kills the spare servers to the MaxSpareServers threshold: 30 - as Apache kills of the unnecessary servers, the Bad Request log entry shows up. Bingo.

Currently I’m trying to find out if this is a bug in apache, but as of yet I’m not finding anything insightful. Hopefully someone who finds themselves confronted with this condition won’t spin as many wheels as I.

Not wanting to loose this, it’s worth jotting down to take a peek at soon. A cursory look over the site, it definately looks interesting - not to mention I’m just a little disenfranchised with Squid. I expect I’ll have a report on it soon enough.
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