cwd's questions

A while ago I did some research and launched a Centos 6.4 image from the Amazon Marketplace. It didn't have any fees (other than usage fees).

That was working fine until I messed up a config file and the instance would no longer boot. Well it turns out there is a gotcha that prevents you from unattaching amazon volumes that were created from the marketplace and reattaching them as secondary volumes on other instances.

The error message says:

Client.OperationNotPermitted: 'vol-xxxxxxxx' with Marketplace codes may not be attached as a secondary device.

Well the answer on Quora said something like:

My name is Julien Ellie, I'm one of the engineers on the AWS Marketplace team at Amazon. We are aware of this issue and we're looking into what can be done to address it. In the meantime if you contact customer support, they can help you through this and hopefully get you unblocked. You can reach them at 1-800-407-2983 or you can find the contact us form on the marketplace website at the bottom of the page.

So I called that number and amazon was on it - they are in fact helping me out - something about removing the code and rescuing the data to another volume. Only problem is that this is taking a few hours.

Well - I still want to run Centos 6.4 but if I have an issue again I don't want the volume to have the marketplace code on it - so how can I launch an "open" AMI of Centos 6.4 ?

The CentOS page says:

Using the AMI's directly is currently deprecated. We are working to resolve issues and establish automation as well as monitoring around resources and process that will allow us to re-enable direct AMI instantiation. In the mean time, the AMI's are listed at the bottom of this document for legacy / reference purposes.

That's fine but is there another solution to get a vanilla version of CentOS 6.4 other than

1. "use this AMI that Bubba made and put on his blog"
2. Build your own CentOS AMI from scratch (not totally against this one just sounds complicated)

What are the options here?

I have In my web root /home/www/ I have an .htaccess file to ban IP addresses:

order allow,deny
deny from 1.2.3.4
deny from 2.3.4.5
allow from all

ErrorDocument 500 /errors/500.htm
ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.htm

I have also tried it this way with the error statements:

ErrorDocument 500 /home/www/errors/500.htm
ErrorDocument 403 /home/www/errors/403.htm

I have created an error directory, /home/www/errors which contains the following files:

403.htm
500.htm
.htaccess

In the errors directory .htaccess I have set the rules:

order deny,allow
allow from all

If I put my IP in the root .htaccess file I can't browse the site. I get an error:

Forbidden - You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

However if I browse to /errors/500.htm I can see that page in my browser, so I know the subdirectory .htaccess seems to allow those files to be loaded.

What am I doing wrong? How can I deny from a certain IP address but still show a custom error page with Apache2?

I have a Windows server that will sometimes reboot into safe mode after updates. I'm working on that issue but what I'd really like to know is how can I check to see if Windows is running in safe mode or not.

Ideally I would like to incorporate it into a script that would send a passive check to our Nagios box with the status.

Is there some environmental variable I can use or some way to get this information via the command line?

I've been googling for how to set up printer monitoring - especially for Canon printers. This is because I have a Canon iR 3035 that I want to monitor for toner problems, paper jams, and paper outages. I found a few references to config settings like this with google searching:

define command{
 command_name       check_hpjd
 command_line       $USER1$/check_hpjd -H $HOSTADDRESS$ $ARG1$
}

However there seems to be no definitive documentation - at least none that I can find. Where should I be looking and how can I learn about setting up printer monitoring with Nagios - especially for the Canon ImageRunner series?

One of the servers I use is hosted on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Every few months we appear to have a DDOS attack on this sever. This slows the server down incredibly. After around 30 minutes, and sometimes a reboot later, everything is back to normal.

Amazon has security groups and firewall, but what else should I have in place on an EC2 server to mitigate or prevent an attack?

From similar questions I've learned:

• Limit the rate of requests/minute (or seconds) from a particular IP address via something like IP tables (or maybe UFW?)
• Have enough resources to survive such an attack - or -
• Possibly build the web application so it is elastic / has an elastic load balancer and can quickly scale up to meet such a high demand)
• If using mySql, set up mySql connections so that they run sequentially so that slow queries won't bog down the system

What else am I missing? I would love information about specific tools and configuration options (again, using Linux here), and/or anything that is specific to Amazon EC2.

ps: Notes about monitoring for DDOS would also be welcomed - perhaps with nagios? ;)

When defining and testing new services in nagios I have been restarting nagios, then clicking the service, and rescheduling a check for as soon as possible, then waiting until the check happens.

Is there a more efficient way to do this? I'd like to use the command line to run that particular check and get the output.

I normally access nagios at mysite.com/nagios3/ but how do I change that?

In the /etc/nagios3/apache2.conf file there are these (and other) variables:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/nagios3 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3
ScriptAlias /nagios3/cgi-bin /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3

# Where the stylesheets (config files) reside
Alias /nagios3/stylesheets /etc/nagios3/stylesheets

# Where the HTML pages live
Alias /nagios3 /usr/share/nagios3/htdocs

I changed them to this:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/test /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3
ScriptAlias /test/cgi-bin /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3

# Where the stylesheets (config files) reside
Alias /test/stylesheets /etc/nagios3/stylesheets

# Where the HTML pages live
Alias /test /usr/share/nagios3/htdocs

Then I can access nagios at mysite.com/test - however the images are not loading as they are still being referenced at /nagios3/images/...

Nagios is a wonderful too for monitoring servers. Their web interface is not bad, either. However I am not crazy about using the HTTP Authentication that comes standard.

Is there a way to use another method of authentication? (and I don't mean restricting access by IP address in the .htaccess file) Something with a form-based login would be wonderful, but perhaps there is no such thing. I'm hoping you guys have found something I haven't.

I launched an Ubuntu EBS instance on Amazon EC2 using the Ubuntu's very own latest AMI for 10.04 Lucid, ami-ad36fbc4`

After getting the instance up, I ran the command sudo aptitude safe-upgrade which seems to have upgraded the kernel from vmlinuz-2.6.32-318-ec2 to vmlinuz-2.6.32-340-ec2

Now the instance won't boot, it gives the following error: Waiting for root file system ...

If I detach the EBS and edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and remove the entries referencing vmlinuz-2.6.32-340-ec2 it will boot again.

So the questions are:

1. Why is this happening?
2. Isn't safe-upgrade supposed to be conservative enough not to break things?
3. Or should I just not be using safe-upgrade on an EC2 instance? And if so why not?

ps: A related issue I read up on while researching this was System boot hangs on Waiting for root file system - Procedure to recover from /dev/hda that became /dev/sda (see section 4.8), but as you can see from the menu.lst the entries are referred to by LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs and not /sda/a and /hda/a

For reference, the grub menu file is as follows:

title       Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-340-ec2
root        (hd0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-340-ec2 root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro xencons=hvc0 console=hvc0 
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-340-ec2

title       Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-340-ec2 (recovery mode)
root        (hd0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-340-ec2 root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro  single
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-340-ec2

title       Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-318-ec2
root        (hd0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-318-ec2 root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro xencons=hvc0 console=hvc0 
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-318-ec2

title       Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-318-ec2 (recovery mode)
root        (hd0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-318-ec2 root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro  single
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-318-ec2

title       Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, memtest86+
root        (hd0)
kernel      /boot/memtest86+.bin

And the boot console looks like this (when it hangs):

i-3121e5b7
2011-11-27T19:20:03+0000
Xen Minimal OS!
  start_info: 0xac4000(VA)
    nr_pages: 0x26700
  shared_inf: 0xbb4b2000(MA)
     pt_base: 0xac7000(VA)
nr_pt_frames: 0x9
    mfn_list: 0x990000(VA)
   mod_start: 0x0(VA)
     mod_len: 0
       flags: 0x0
    cmd_line: root=/dev/sda1 ro 4
  stack:      0x94f860-0x96f860
MM: Init
      _text: 0x0(VA)
     _etext: 0x5ff6d(VA)
   _erodata: 0x78000(VA)
     _edata: 0x80b00(VA)
stack start: 0x94f860(VA)
       _end: 0x98fe68(VA)
  start_pfn: ad3
    max_pfn: 26700
Mapping memory range 0xc00000 - 0x26700000
setting 0x0-0x78000 readonly
skipped 0x1000
MM: Initialise page allocator for c01000(c01000)-26700000(26700000)
MM: done
Demand map pfns at 26701000-2026701000.
Heap resides at 2026702000-4026702000.
Initialising timer interface
Initialising console ... done.
gnttab_table mapped at 0x26701000.
Initialising scheduler
Thread "Idle": pointer: 0x2026702010, stack: 0x26640000
Initialising xenbus
Thread "xenstore": pointer: 0x20267027c0, stack: 0x26650000
Dummy main: start_info=0x96f960
Thread "main": pointer: 0x2026702f70, stack: 0x26660000
"main" "root=/dev/sda1" "ro" "4" 
vbd 2049 is hd0
******************* BLKFRONT for device/vbd/2049 **********


backend at /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/526/2049
Failed to read /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/526/2049/feature-barrier.
Failed to read /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/526/2049/feature-flush-cache.
16777216 sectors of 512 bytes
**************************
[H[J  Booting 'Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-340-ec2'

root  (hd0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, using whole disk
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-340-ec2 root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro xencons=hvc0
 console=hvc0 
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-340-ec2

xc_dom_probe_bzimage_kernel: kernel is not a bzImage
close blk: backend at /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/526/2049
[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[    0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32-340-ec2 (buildd@yellow) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) ) #40-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 16 14:36:38 UTC 2011 (Ubuntu 2.6.32-340.40-ec2 2.6.32.46+drm33.20)
[    0.000000] Command line: root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro xencons=hvc0 console=hvc0 
[    0.000000] KERNEL supported cpus:
[    0.000000]   Intel GenuineIntel
[    0.000000]   AMD AuthenticAMD
[    0.000000]   Centaur CentaurHauls
[    0.000000] Xen-provided physical RAM map:
[    0.000000]  Xen: 0000000000000000 - 0000000026f00000 (usable)
[    0.000000] last_pfn = 0x26f00 max_arch_pfn = 0x80000000
[    0.000000] init_memory_mapping: 0000000000000000-0000000026f00000
[    0.000000] NX (Execute Disable) protection: active
[    0.000000] RAMDISK: 01844000 - 03293000
[    0.000000] (3 early reservations) ==> bootmem [0000000000 - 0026700000]
[    0.000000]   #0 [0001844000 - 00033e9000]     Xen provided ==> [0001844000 - 00033e9000]
[    0.000000]   #1 [0001000000 - 00018237b8]    TEXT DATA BSS ==> [0001000000 - 00018237b8]
[    0.000000]   #2 [00033e9000 - 0003523000]          PGTABLE ==> [00033e9000 - 0003523000]
[    0.000000] Zone PFN ranges:
[    0.000000]   DMA      0x00000000 -> 0x00001000
[    0.000000]   DMA32    0x00001000 -> 0x00100000
[    0.000000]   Normal   0x00100000 -> 0x00100000
[    0.000000] Movable zone start PFN for each node
[    0.000000] early_node_map[2] active PFN ranges
[    0.000000]     0: 0x00000000 -> 0x00026700
[    0.000000]     0: 0x00026f00 -> 0x00026f00
[    0.000000] NR_CPUS:64 nr_cpumask_bits:64 nr_cpu_ids:1 nr_node_ids:1
[    0.000000] PERCPU: Embedded 18 pages/cpu @ffff880003298000 s44248 r8192 d21288 u73728
[    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: s44248 r8192 d21288 u73728 alloc=18*4096
[    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: [0] 0 
[    0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 155259
[    0.000000] Kernel command line: root=LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs ro xencons=hvc0 console=hvc0 
[    0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
[    0.000000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
[    0.000000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[    0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[    0.000000] allocated 6379520 bytes of page_cgroup
[    0.000000] please try 'cgroup_disable=memory' option if you don't want memory cgroups
[    0.000000] Software IO TLB disabled
[    0.000000] Memory: 574464k/637952k available (4836k kernel code, 8192k absent, 54588k reserved, 2084k data, 228k init)
[    0.000000] Hierarchical RCU implementation.
[    0.000000] NR_IRQS:96
[    0.000000] Xen reported: 2666.760 MHz processor.
[    0.000000] Console: colour dummy device 80x25
[    0.000000] console [hvc0] enabled
[    0.230003] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5347.09 BogoMIPS (lpj=26735464)
[    0.230055] Security Framework initialized
[    0.230073] AppArmor: AppArmor initialized
[    0.230089] Mount-cache hash table entries: 256
[    0.230209] Initializing cgroup subsys ns
[    0.230215] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct
[    0.230218] Initializing cgroup subsys memory
[    0.230228] Initializing cgroup subsys devices
[    0.230230] Initializing cgroup subsys freezer
[    0.230259] CPU: L1 I cache: 32K, L1 D cache: 32K
[    0.230262] CPU: L2 cache: 6144K
[    0.230271] SMP alternatives: switching to UP code
[    0.255645] Freeing SMP alternatives: 39k freed
[    0.255834] Brought up 1 CPUs
[    0.255922] devtmpfs: initialized
[    0.256333] NET: Registered protocol family 16
[    0.256945] Brought up 1 CPUs
[    0.257349] PCI: Fatal: No config space access function found
[    0.257353] PCI: setting up Xen PCI frontend stub
[    0.257605] bio: create slab <bio-0> at 0
[    0.257681] vgaarb: loaded
[    0.257889] suspend: event channel 9
[    0.258172] xen_mem: Initialising balloon driver.
[    0.260364] PCI: System does not support PCI
[    0.260368] PCI: System does not support PCI
[    0.260432] NET: Registered protocol family 8
[    0.260435] NET: Registered protocol family 20
[    0.260451] NetLabel: Initializing
[    0.260455] NetLabel:  domain hash size = 128
[    0.260456] NetLabel:  protocols = UNLABELED CIPSOv4
[    0.260490] NetLabel:  unlabeled traffic allowed by default
[    0.260505] Switching to clocksource xen
[    0.261840] AppArmor: AppArmor Filesystem Enabled
[    0.262007] NET: Registered protocol family 2
[    0.262083] IP route cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
[    0.262363] TCP established hash table entries: 131072 (order: 9, 2097152 bytes)
[    0.263136] TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
[    0.263553] TCP: Hash tables configured (established 131072 bind 65536)
[    0.263559] TCP reno registered
[    0.263629] NET: Registered protocol family 1
[    0.263708] platform rtc_cmos: registered platform RTC device (no PNP device found)
[    0.263814] audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)
[    0.263838] type=2000 audit(1322421419.386:1): initialized
[    0.269569] Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[    0.279699] VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.2
[    0.279731] Dquot-cache hash table entries: 512 (order 0, 4096 bytes)
[    0.279885] DLM (built Nov 16 2011 14:40:41) installed
[    0.279994] JFS: nTxBlock = 4920, nTxLock = 39360
[    0.289416] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, large block/inode numbers, no debug enabled
[    0.289643] SGI XFS Quota Management subsystem
[    0.299611] Slow work thread pool: Starting up
[    0.299651] Slow work thread pool: Ready
[    0.299659] GFS2 (built Nov 16 2011 14:41:38) installed
[    0.299675] msgmni has been set to 1230
[    0.299847] alg: No test for stdrng (krng)
[    0.299858] io scheduler noop registered
[    0.299860] io scheduler anticipatory registered
[    0.299862] io scheduler deadline registered (default)
[    0.299871] io scheduler cfq registered
[    0.314987] Serial: 8250/16550 driver, 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
[    0.315818] brd: module loaded
[    0.316148] loop: module loaded
[    0.316216] Xen virtual console successfully installed as hvc0
[    0.316254] Event-channel device installed.
[    0.324444] Freeing initrd memory: 26940k freed
[    0.338978] netfront: Initialising virtual ethernet driver.
[    0.340057] PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
[    0.340628] Equalizer2002: Simon Janes ([email protected]) and David S. Miller ([email protected])
[    0.340767] tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6
[    0.340769] tun: (C) 1999-2004 Max Krasnyansky <[email protected]>
[    0.341644] i8042.c: No controller found.
[    0.341704] mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
[    0.341758] rtc_cmos rtc_cmos: rtc core: registered rtc_cmos as rtc0
[    0.341810] Driver for 1-wire Dallas network protocol.
[    0.341865] device-mapper: uevent: version 1.0.3
[    0.341932] device-mapper: ioctl: 4.15.0-ioctl (2009-04-01) initialised: [email protected]
[    0.342186] NET: Registered protocol family 17
[    0.342285] registered taskstats version 1
[    0.355601] xen-vbd: registered block device major 8
[    0.440415] XENBUS: Device with no driver: device/console/0
[    0.440429] /build/buildd/linux-ec2-2.6.32/drivers/rtc/hctosys.c: unable to open rtc device (rtc0)
[    0.440534] Freeing unused kernel memory: 228k freed
[    0.440675] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 6492k
Loading, please wait...
[    0.460565] udev: starting version 151
Begin: Loading essential drivers ... done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... done.
Begin: Mounting root file system ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... done.
Begin: Waiting for root file system ... 

It's possible in apache's configuration httpd.conf to set up .htaccess so that it is named something different, using the AccessFileName .htaccess directive.

Is there any way to set up PHP so it looks for the php.ini file under a different name? (I'm not trying to symlink - thanks)

Update

For those of you who are curious about why I would want to do such a thing:

I would be looking at changing the name of the file on the development machine, not the production machine. I've already set up a different .htaccess name on my local machine and it's been great. I can rsync between remote and local and keep different copies of both files on each machine, and yet only the proper file has effect. I can then diff the two files locally, which is nice.

These files both have more to do with the web sever configuration, and less to do with the web applications. Perhaps it is important to set up different include paths, or other such variables which are server specific. That sort of thing. Ideally your development server is a duplicate of the production server, but if you work on several different remote servers, especially with shared hosting, this is the kind of thing which is really convenient.

So basically having a different config file name for these local files and the remote files just allows keeping both copies side by side.

Similar to Is it possible to install Mailparse extension via PECL installation - without recompiling PHP I'm trying to install mailparse on xampp. XAMPP actually has a guide for this, and I've tried to follow along.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Installing_on_XAMPP_MacOSX

I've got the latest version (1.7.3) via the XAMPP site, and I had the same problems mentioned in the other question until I installed the dev package (oops) but then it did say that it installed and that it modified the php.ini file, and I can confirm that, previously there was no extension="mailparse.so" and now it is there.

However, when I check the system using phpinfo() it does not show up, and when I try using the mailparse commands it gives an error, for example

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mailparse_rfc822_parse_addresses()

I have already restarted XAMPP, just not sure what to do/check next.

I checked my server IP using this tool:

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx

It's come up on the ivmSIP/24 list.

What can I do to get my IP removed from this list? I have SPF records set to allow this IP to send mail on behalf of the domain.

I just came across a server that does not respond to things like ping localhost or mysql -h localhost - I believe this is because localhost is not defined in the hosts file.

On just about every machine I've used localhost has been an entry in the hosts file. Is there any good reasons not to define it - like possible security concerns? Or is this something that probably should be configured by default and perhaps is just missing?

I have the following configuration in my DNS Zone. I want to switch the @ record to a different IP address, but I want to keep the MX records the same. Please note the IP address has been changed to 76.13.141.185 to protect privacy.

So, what I'm wondering is, can I change then @ record and then can I just change the MX entries Host from @ to 76.13.141.185 ?

I'm wondering because when I use http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ and do a MX lookup for a different domain that is I believe on the same server, it gives me 4 different IP addresses, none of which match the current @ record's IP address.

So should I change my MX section to look like this?

Possible Duplicate:
How to understand the memory usage and load average in linux server

My hosting company provides "Load Average" stats when I login. There is no link to more information about them, and no explanation as to what they mean. I'm guessing they are a percentage, but I have no clue why there are three numbers, or what the percentage is actually out of (processor, memory, bandwidth, combination?), and is that this instant or over time? Is this a standard statistic that I should know about?

What are high / low / normal numbers?

Perhaps someone can shed some light on this for me.

Examples:

Load Averages: 0.60 0.60 0.55

On my webserver I have this file: /etc/logrotate.d/apache2

I know it is logrotating /var/log/apache2/.log, but if I want to add things that are in /usr/home/www/site1/logs/.log do I just duplicate everything below and stick that line in there? Each time I add a new site do I need to manually add lines to this file?

Or what is the most professional way to do this?

/var/log/apache2/*.log {
    weekly
    missingok
    rotate 52
    compress
    delaycompress
    notifempty
    create 640 root adm
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        if [ -f "`. /etc/apache2/envvars ; echo ${APACHE_PID_FILE:-/var/run/apache2.pid}`" ]; then
            /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
        fi
    endscript
}

How do you set max execution time of PHP's CLI component? I have a CLI script that has gone into a infinite loop and I'm not sure how to kill it without restarting. I used quicksilver to launch it, so I can't press control+c at the command line. I tried running ps -A (show all processes) but php is not showing up in that list, so perhaps it has timed out on it's own - but how do you manually set the time limit?

I tried to find information about where I should set the max_execution_time setting, I'm used to setting this for the version of PHP that runs with apache, but I have no idea where to set it for the version of PHP that lives in /usr/bin.

I did see the follow quote, which does seem to be accurate (see screenshot below), but having an unlimited execution time doesn't seem like a good idea.

Keep in mind that for CLI SAPI max_execution_time is hardcoded to 0. So it seems to be changed by ini_set or set_time_limit but it isn't, actually. The only references I've found to this strange decision are deep in bugtracker (http://bugs.php.net/37306) and in php.ini (comments for 'max_execution_time' directive). (via http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php)

ini_set('max_execution_time') has no effect. I also tried the same thing and go the same result with set_time_limit(7).

Update

So there seem to be three ways to achieve this:

In the script:

set_time_limit(10); // this way
ini_set('max_execution_time', 10); // or this way

Or when calling the script:

php -d max_execution_time=5 script.php

To answer my question about where the php.ini file would be loaded from, that would be from /etc/php.ini if it exists. That file also needs to be readable by the user who is running the php script, so if it was created by root and a user can't "read" it, that means php probably can't "read" it either.

However, it appears that any max_execution_time set in /etc/php.ini actually will not affect the CLI scripts - even if the file is being properly loaded (use phpinfo() to find out) - so you must use one of the other methods mentioned above.

Regarding using a sleep loop to test this, I learned that it won't work.

The set_time_limit() function and the configuration directive max_execution_time only affect the execution time of the script itself. Any time spent on activity that happens outside the execution of the script such as system calls using system(), the sleep() function, database queries, etc. is not included when determining the maximum time that the script has been running

Check out a very similar question asked on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5874950/set-max-execution-time-in-php-cli

I am running Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 and I have X11 installed. I also have ubuntu 10.04 LTS running on a remote machine. I have root privileges. So far I haven't really installed anything besides the operating system. This was done in an amazon aws type of way.

I see people talking about getting gnome or a "remote desktop" type of thing working, but I'm not sure how to go about this. I connected and then typed in gnome-session but nothing happened. Maybe I don't have that thing installed yet? Can someone point me in the right direction?

Also, is it possible to just start an X11 session with a single app, like notepad or a file and folder browser?

I'm trying to add a conditional statement using Apache's If directive in my .htaccess file.

I have referenced this page http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/core.html#if but it doesn't elaborate much / give many examples. Two incomplete examples it gives are:

<If %{REQUEST_METHOD} IN GET,HEAD,OPTIONS> 

and

<If "$req{Host} = ''"> 

So I've tried to add this to my .htaccess file:

<If %{SERVER_PORT} IN GET,HEAD,OPTIONS>
   #nothing here yet
</If>

But I keep getting Error 500 when I try and load the page. This is on my local install, and it was working fine previously (or if I remove that code). I believe I have AllowOverride All set up globally, and the context for the If directive should let it be present in .htaccess ("Context: server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess").

Can someone give me some examples of how to properly use the <If> directive, or some guidance as to why it is not working for me?

Thanks!

I've been trying to grab the output of man pages and use it in some other things. That's working OK, but linux is hyphenating the words that are at the end of a line and that's kind of irritating because when the text is reconstructed on a variable width viewing window (think HTML), the line breaks reamin split- ting up ran- dom words.

How should I do this? I saw the entry regarding MANWIDTH but I can't get it to work...

I tried:

MANWIDTH=30
man ls

-- also --

MANWIDTH=1000
man ls

No luck. I tried creating a man.conf that had MANWIDTH 30 (no "=" sign) and putting it in ~ and then tried:

man -C ~/man.conf ls

Man opens and it give me something like this:

^H1/4[{sUEy;o)||1XEQ'eo2>>vYYR%+-B
_
                                      _
AUe X...-qe>uyo{R2}Ia\fzuyv?>Oy|3+aaOGN+->ynuuLu{Ey3/4aecSYI~3[=5KVc]aem|6ME=ei2E,
>>Z-:-OT3p<<cMnUA]ColXa+-No?6 AzQakmoEyo32HaeUoEaIxfSc;@S3[&%VDaODO(C)3O}I3
$2z-II9|D5S'VIo.m-PEA9|?'YXi4eZcy}R(R)t^oyu9|d0e<N8t4a3/41A:)
oMNb"ao"OOu>EDaD&E`haUooEiw;f1C.bU-C KpAyb^92uE
o2LKAe   N}2OFSFi~MAO QA9|xT@k1/4zy$l'eAAy']CC/>>K^%T*LmI~An&qu
ot;o1/2i2(R)141L,Z o.LXniE$~R6.a5O#AEUA14UiFwY~xIpB8<<JOo(R)QoMAEnUxu$Iw&Cj3eO
fBLJ[Q^Xi-:->>(R)Eo2pm1c, _3ii<<EsCa;

So how do I get rid of those hyphenated words in the mid- dle of my man output?