Vidax.net – The blog

When it comes to project management, Redmine is one of the best tools according to me. Written in Ruby on Rails, it offers a huge amount of features in a clean, really nice and efficient interface. Plus it’s free and open source.

One of these features is related to Subversion. Redmine is able to interact with Subversion:

• it has a powerful repository browser able to link tasks and commits.
• it can manage SVN authentication. Redmine users have therefore access to the SVN repository with same username and password

In order to setup up this feature, you must follow this tutorial: http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/HowTo_to_handle_SVN_repositories_creation_and_access_control_with_Redmine

Sadly, this is not that simple. This tutorial doesn’t work on recent versions of Redmine (see post here: http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/24383?r=26204). Redmine has updated it authentication system in adding a salt field. Initially, Redmine passwords were SHA1(password) only. Now passwords are SHA1(salt.SHA1(password)). This format is not supported by pam_mysql out of the box.

I’ve therefore patched pam_mysql.c. Patch is here: http://pastebin.com/4SATdQ8u

In order to use it, you must:

1. download pam_mysql source here
2. apply the attached patch on pam_mysql.c using the « patch » command
3. compile again pam_mysql: « make clean && make && make install »
4. modify the MySQL ssh_users view running this SQL query:

   CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW ssh_users as
   select login as username, CONCAT(hashed_password, '|', salt) as password
   from users
   where status = 1;

5. edit /etc/pam.d/sshd and set crypt=5 for the 3 blocks

Auth will now take the salt into account. For pam_mysql-0.7RC1 only.
Let me know whether it works

Hi there,

another configuration file for WordPress 3 running on Nginx:

server
        {
                listen 80;
                server_name blog.******.com;
                root /var/www/blog;
                index index.php;

                location /
                {
                        try_files $uri $uri/ @wordpress;
                }

                # BLOCKS ACCESS TO . FILES (.svn, .htaccess, ...)
                location ~ /\. {
                        deny  all;
                }

                # FOR PHP FILES
                location ~* \.php$ {
                        try_files $uri $uri/ @wordpress;

                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        fastcgi_index index.php;
                        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                        include fastcgi_params;
                }

                location @wordpress {
                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        #fastcgi_index index.php;
                        include fastcgi_params;
                        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root/index.php;
                        break;
                }

                location ~ /\. {
                        deny  all;
                }

                location ~* \.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.jpeg|\.png|\.gif|\.swf|\.svg|\.tiff$ {
                        expires 30d;
                }
}

There you go!

When indexing like me french content into Sphinx, accentuated and non-accentuated search queries will not return the same results. For instance, searching on « Môle » returns a result unlike a search on « Mole ».
Read the rest of this entry »

In order to improve performances, I chose to switch web server for one of my websites. I switched from Apache 2 to Nginx, extremely fast and powerful. It’s not easy to configure though: it took me a really long time to configure Nginx for Kohana 2. Here is my configuration file:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name www.xxxx.com;
	root /var/www/xxxx/prod/public;
	index index.php;

	# ROUTING TO KOHANA IF REQUIRED
	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ @kohana;
	}

	# BLOCKS ACCESS TO . FILES (.svn, .htaccess, ...)
	location ~ /\. {
		deny  all;
	}

	# FOR PHP FILES
	location ~* \.php$ {
	 	# PHP FILES MIGHT BE TO HANDLED BY KOHANA
		try_files $uri $uri/ @kohana;

		fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
		include fastcgi_params;
	}


	# HANDLES THE REWRITTEN URLS TO KOHANA CONTROLLER
	location @kohana
	{
		fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/index.php;
	}


	# CACHE CONTROL FOR STATIC FILES
	location ~* \.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.jpeg|\.png|\.gif|\.swf|\.svg|\.tiff|\.pdf$ {
		expires 30d;
	}

	# REDIRECTING MEDIAS TO STATIC
	location ^~ /medias/ {
		rewrite ^/medias/(.*) http://static.xxxx.com/$1 permanent;
		break;
	}

}



server {
	listen 80;
	server_name static.xxxx.com;
	root /var/www/xxxx/medias/;    
	expires 90d;

	location /videos/ {
		keepalive_timeout     200 190;

		#limit_conn   videos  2;
		mp4;
		limit_rate_after 512k;
		limit_rate 512k;

		error_page 404 = /videos/video_not_found.png;
	}
}

My homepage now loads in 1,5s instead of 7s before. Thanks to Nginx