Exploring /proc - useful explanation of the /proc filesystem.

Simon Willison: PHP and Apache 2.0 - usefully sums up the problem with PHP and Apache 2. One of the comments mentions that it's OK in RHEL though, which is what I am looking at right now.
Also found this:
"MPMs is how Apache 2 handles multiple web server requests. That is, with multiple processes or multiple threads or some combination. For now, on Linux (and even UNIX) you should only use the (default) prefork module with PHP. This is specified at compile time. Other MPM modules (any involving threaes) break PHP. This is partly because PHP uses a great number of external libraries, and many or most of them are not thread-safe or thread-aware. In any case, Linux 2.4 doesn't handle threads efficiently yet--multiple processes are better (this changes with Linux 2.6, or RedHat 9 with 2.6 threads backported to Linux 2.4).".

unknown network activity - a useful discussion. Someone is sending IIS buffer overrun attacks against my web server. Fortunately, I'm running Apache on Linux behind a firewall, so it's not done any damage, other than makng a mess of my log files. Still, these guys have a couple of useful pointers for additional security that I might well take up.
There's also a useful tip here on modifying Apache so that it doesn't bother logging reams of crap when the IIS attack is launched.

Knowing Knoppix - Wikibooks is a great reference resource for Knoppix, which helped me out of another situation today.
Sometimes Linux just does rock my pants :)

Linux Journal - Doc Searls writes for these guys, I think.

Installing Linux on the Libretto (again).

So, the libretto in my life (an old 70ct) is being revived. Why? Well, I have this crazy idea about using TunesBrowser and a WiFi card so that it can sit near my stereo being small and quiet and just be an mp3 player using my daapd shared music library.

So, previously the libretto was running Debian Woody, with a bunch of manually hacked crap to allow it to do WiFi (mainly HostAP - see my old posts) and a lot of unnecessary services that I had been playing with (samba and Apache server, Webmin) and that were using up some of the precious 32MB RAM. The machine had about 200MB free disk space (it's only a 1.2GB disk).

How did I install Woody? Well, I can't remember the details, but it wasn't that hard. I basically lifted the hard disk out of the libretto and shoved it in an old Tecra from the same era. I booted the Tecra from Woody install media and installed the base system on the HDD. I then shoved the HDD back in the libretto and completed the install. That's about it. The difficult bit was the X config and HostAP stuff I did later....

Anyway, I had a chew over my options, and decided to stick with Debian because, well, it rocks as a free O/S. I didn't want to do an upgrade though, as I have little system resources and wanted to do a lean and clean install of Sarge. What I did, therefore, was a network install, booting from the hard disk. I then just hacked LILO to give me a boot menu, rebooted and chose "newinstall".

What's cool is that I did this all with a Netgear PCMCIA Wireless card, and the new installer just let me join my wireless LAN and get on with it - the network install is going on over WiFi as I speak. All that fighting with HostAP is (hopefully) a thing of the past. :)

MiniSlack - The project site of the MiniSlack linux distribution

Building a Linux Virtual Server. This is not a cluster as I understand it, as it does not provide for a single instance of a service across multiple servers. It also (as described) has a single point of failure, but it is incredibly simple and is a pretty good load balancing solution. Can't see why anyone would use Windows NLB when you can do stuff like this on Linux :)

Well, Apple might have gone intel, but at least Debian Sarge has been released to cheer me up a bit :)