Matt's questions

I'd like to find out how many browsers reject our SSL certificate when making HTTP requests to our webserver. We're using a free CA which now seems to be recognised by most modern browsers, but I'd like to get some numbers without exhaustively testing combinations of browsers and operating systems.

I understand that the browser terminates the connection when certificate verification fails, so is there any way for Apache to detect this? I don't expect to get specific diagnostic information - just the fact that there was a certificate/SSL problem is enough.

If two computers are connected by ethernet directly (ie, with no router between them) can one computer wake the other using the magic packet?

I ask because it's not working for me and I'm not getting very useful search results. If someone can confirm that this should indeed work then I can check and re-check the system settings and specifications.

I'm running Ubuntu server on a computer used as a wireless AP, but this AP should resolve all DNS requests to an internal IP address rather than actually performing the lookup.

I want to do the same thing that paid public WiFi hotspots do - you can connect but if you attempt to load any websites they show a default page. I've noticed that they do this by resolving all domains to an internal IP address.

I've added these lines to /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

# Add domains which you want to force to an IP address here.
# The example below send any host in double-click.net to a local
# web-server.
address=/com/192.168.2.1
address=/uk/192.168.2.1
address=/org/192.168.2.1
address=/gov/192.168.2.1
address=/net/192.168.2.1
address=/us/192.168.2.1

which works fine for those TLD's, but I'd like to be able to do it with all domains so I can sleep at night.

My server is running Ubuntu 10.04 and is connected by ethernet to a router/modem device. The problem is that it's basically ignoring incoming connections. So I can't SSH into it or access the webserver. It wont even accept connections from other machines within the network.

However, it can make outbound connections fine. When it starts up it successfully sends me the startup email (connects to gmail SMTP servers etc). It can also perform DNS requests and get the response fine, after trying "dig". ethtool and ifconfig confirm that the server is connected and has the usual internal IP address.

The strange thing is that on the routers control panel, there are no signs of the server being connected at all. The server does not connect using DHCP, but manually defined settings. I've double checked the config and everything is fine (as it should be - I haven't changed anything).

This is a pain to troubleshoot, so could anyone give me any pointers on what the problem may be? I'm having to read commands out over the phone because I can't just SSH in and play around.

I'm using a remote dedicated server running ubuntu server edition, and I have no idea what the upload/download speeds are.

Is there a reliable method to test these speeds via the command line? I know you can just download a file and look at the rate, but that depends on the speed of the hosting server and you don't get an upload speed =/

I've just installed lighttpd, and I'm not seeing any error messages on pages when I know errors must have occurred. All I get is a blank page. However, I do get the errors in the error log file - but I really want to see them while I develop instead of going into the log.

Surely lighttpd isn't supposed to do this?

I'm running an web application hosting service (basically hosting forums for free), and I have two remote servers at my disposal. The code for the application is stored on both servers and isn't a problem, but I'm wondering how to deal with the databases.

When someone goes onto a site *.example-host.com, they are sent to one of the two servers and both must be capable of loading the forums from a database. The database must also have write access, for when new members register or post topics etc.

The main requirement is speed, but uptime is also important (if a server goes out, the site should still work).

I have a few options, but I'm inexperienced and not sure which to go with:

1) [PHP] Split the forum records 50:50 between the two servers. If a server does not have the record for a forum requested, it can request it from the other by remote MySQL and load it. This idea sounded okay, until I realised that 50% of the time, users would be waiting significantly longer for pages to load. I also realised that if one of the servers went down, half the forums would be inaccessible and registrations would have to be disabled.

2) [MySQL] Dual master replication. This would attempt to mirror the two databases and sounds perfect, but I've heard that it can be very problematic. I don't know how fast this is.

3) [MySQL] Use a standard replication, distribute read only queries on both nodes and read/write queries to the master. This sounds like a good option, but again, I'm not sure on speed. I also don't know what would happen if the master server went down.

If you have any other suggestions, please post them :)

I'm running two load balanced servers for one website, and I'd like the databases to be synchronized. Queries may be run on either of the two servers because they are both production sites, so the replication can't just work one way.

It doesn't have to be in real-time, just fairly accurate so people don't notice a difference when they get switched to a different server.