Zelut’s Blog

I love FreeBSD for how efficient and minimalistic it can be.  For my web servers I like to add to this efficiency by using Lighttpd instead of the larger, older, Apache.

The one little issue with Lighttpd vs Apache is getting all the same module support setup for all the little tweaks that you’ve come to enjoy.

I should mention that Lighttpd supports many of the same modules that Apache does, and once you learn how they work I think they are even more intuitive than Apache’s config.  One of the most important to me is the mod_rewrite for use with my WordPress blogs.  As you can see from the URL I use fancy addresses for my posts.  %date%/%name%, etc.  I think this is more user friendly (not to mention Google-friendly) than something like php?=53.  What kind of URL is that?

In any case, a very simple way to achieve this in Lighttpd is to use the following single line in your lighttpd.conf file:

## added for WP pretty URLs
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"

Again, I’d argue this is much simpler than a dozen lines in an .htaccess file and gives you the same results.  It’s like magic!

Perhaps I’ll do a few more posts regarding other aspects of Lighttpd configuration as it compares to Apache.  Things like mod_redirect, mod_auth, mod_alias, etc.  Until then, if you haven’t tried out Lighttpd you really should!

Update: I have suggested a minor improvement to this setup.  Read More…

For some time now I’ve been maintaining about a dozen FreeBSD jails, each running a different set of services. Everything from email to BIND, DHCP to nagios. One of the difficulties of trying to maintain so many servers has been tracking and applying updates, particularly servers that use the ports system which is updated so frequently.

The solution that I’ve come up with is to use portmaster inside a weekly cron job to notify me of available updates on each machine. This requires a slightly different cron job on the host system that within the jails. Here is an example of what I’m running within each:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

/usr/sbin/portsnap cron
/usr/local/bin/ezjail-admin update -P

/usr/local/sbin/portmaster -L | egrep -B1 ‘(ew|ort) version|Aborting|installed|dependencies|IGNORE|marked|reason:|MOVED’ | grep -v ‘^–’ | mail -s “Portmaster Weekly Check for $(hostname)” admin@domain.tld


#!/usr/local/bin/bash

/usr/local/sbin/portmaster -L | egrep -B1 ‘(ew|ort) version|Aborting|installed|dependencies|IGNORE|marked|reason:|MOVED’ | grep -v ‘^–’ | mail -s “Portmaster Weekly Check for $(hostname)” admin@domain.tld

As you can probably tell, the only major difference between the two is that the cron job as run on the host system also updates the ports tree prior to checking for updates. The cron job within the jail system simply runs the check.

I save these two scripts inside /etc/periodic/weekly/999.portmaster and make them executable.  From that point on I’m notified via email regarding updates available to my installed ports.

I’d be interested in hearing what solutions others have come up with for monitoring and maintaining ports updates from so many FreeBSD servers.