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...) ...

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 ...