My original lil’ Linux box, an old Dell P133 (back when I bought PC’s pre-assembled, how boring), wasn’t really up to serving up a full GUI while I was taxing it for all my server needs (proxy, web server, etc.). So I always ran in non-X “init 3” mode. Now that it’s been upped to an AMD K6-2 400MHz (yeah it could be better, but it could be worse), I have Gnome running. I haven’t used it for much yet, but now that I’ve gotten XWin-32 up, I can run all those juicy freshmeat apps under Windows. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to set up. BTW, Putty has been my ssh client of choice, again simple as pie to use.

XWin-32
server machine = thedigitalmachine.com
connection type = rsh

Putty
export DISPLAY=[IP]:0
[any x app] &

Running this little site, along with online bookmarks and online email, has really been kicking Apache’s booty on my little K6-2 400MHz. Checking Apache’s performance-tuning help, I tweaked the following:

  • MaxClients 15
    This is the most fundamental setting, I turned it down from 150 to 15 to stop all the page swapping I was getting.
  • AllowOverride None
    This saves Apache from having to look for any “.htaccess” files that happen to be scattered about.
  • Options FollowSymLinks
    This saves Apache from having to call lstat all over the place to see if a file is a symlink.
  • HostnameLookups off
    This saves Apache from having to do DNS resolutions of names from all the IP’s just so it can write them in logs or whatever.

1000% snappier! Happy happy joy joy!

I have been dreaming of being master of my very own email addresses for a while now. Finally, [ m @ thedigitalmachine.com] has arrived.

Actually getting Redhat 7.2 to cooperate with my plans required a bit of digging to uncover an underlying problem. It turns out that for Redhat 7.2’s default configuration, “sendmail will only accept and send email for ‘localhost'”. You will not get mail from any other box until you change this default, which takes a little work. Get the full dirt here, read on… (continued…)

Xax has gotten another round of the Embedded HTTP Server (EHS) together. It now handles MIME! Check it out at his EHS page.

OK, Apache’s cool, but have you ever tried to build it yourself? If you want to add support for some rather fundamental features, it can be a real pain to get it all right. The main problem is that some of the modules (mod_ssl, mod_perl) ideally should be merged into the Apache SOURCE and then built. Here are detailed instructions for Building Apache on Redhat 7.2.