Soumplis' Personal Web Site

Installing a Ruby on Rails applications under CentOS can easily be a painful process. Ruby tends to have updated versions very often and unfortunately compatibility between version is usually not the priority for Ruby or Gem developers. This makes Ruby a no-go for stable and slow moving Linux releases such as CentOS.  Having said that below I'll try to share my experience trying to serve OSCurrency (a fork of  Insoshi) out of a CentOS 5.6 server. So let's start.... (more...) ...

Some time ago I've had to implement fencing on a Redhat cluster consisting of two cluster nodes, in an active-passive setup and two APC AP7921 power distribution units. While playing around with the fence_apc_snmp script as provided by Redhat, I've discovered a bug regarding the return status of an outlet after changing it's state. I wrote a patch and submited a full bug report to Redhat regarding the issue. (more...) ...

After a long time watching closely the evolution of Spacewalk (you know, the open source Redhat Satellite server), I decided to move on to its version 1.0. I have a working installation with more than 40 clients since version 0.2 and I followed all upgrades until version 0.8. At some time there I decided to wait for version 1.0 to move to a new server with adequate resources to handle the load. I must admit that I had a secret hope of not installing Oracle again. I proceeded to the ...

In the world of security everybody admits that the question is not "if a security breach will happen, but when". This weekend was my turn. I do my best to keep up to date my blog and generally I try to keep bad guys out of my place. However a nasty Javascript XSS (cross-site) attack hit me on Friday evening. I noticed that something could be wrong with my blog when my antivirus software initiated alarms every time I opened my browser (where suprisingly, I have my web site as homepage :-)). ...

Today is my birthday... OK, no big deal for anyone else except me, my family, Ktz (a.k.a. Jane) and maybe some friends. However I wanted to use this internet corner to Thank them all for just being there for me all the time... ...

Today I decided to update my Spacewalk server to the latest version (0.8 on today's nightly build). In case you have never heard of Spacewalk before, "Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived". Personally I use it as a central update server for all my CentOS server (more than 40 systems at the moment). I follow spacewalk since version 0.2, so one can easy understand ...

Well it happened to me today a strong fight against a spammer on one of my servers. I had a very hard time tracking down the originator of the spam as it was a shared hosting server and the spammer had gained, among others, ftp access to the exploited account. Thus it was easy to hide the spam sending code within a legitimate and ordinary looking php script which implemented its own SMTP engine. This way there where no logs on my Exim SMTP server log files and I had to examine Apache log files ...

I am trying to bring this page online since the last three months... Nothing great but i so desperately out of time that I could not give my attention to this. Hopefully now that it's all set I'll update this blog with news, information, solutions and generally anything that it may be of interest to all of you out there. Some times I will also post stories of my personal life just a depressurisation pump for my self. My psy-doctor adivces me to share my thoughts with others :-) Greetings to ...