Chmod, Umask, Stat, Fileperms, and File Permissions

I began researching permissions in detail. I went deep into the source code of Apache (which is why this site is called AskApache, BTW), PHP, Python, Ocaml, Perl, Ruby, and POSIX operating systems and got a pretty good handle on it now..

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ApacheCon US 2009

Call for Papers Opens for ApacheCon US 2009

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) invites submissions to its official user and developer conference, taking place 2-6 November 2009 at the Oakland Convention Center and Marriott Hotel. ApacheCon serves as a forum for showcasing the ASF’s latest projects, members, and community initiatives. Offering unparalleled educational opportunities, ApacheCon’s presentations, hands-on trainings, and sessions address key technology, development, business/community, and licensing issues in Open Source.

The wide range of activities offered at ApacheCon promotes the exchange of ideas amongst ASF Members, committers, innovators, developers, vendors, and users interested in the future of Open Source technology. The conference program includes peer-reviewed sessions, trainings/workshops, and select invited keynote presentations and speakers.

Conference Themes and Topics

Building on ten years of success, ApacheCon returns to the Bay Area for the 10th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. Comprising some of the most active and recognized developers in the Open Source community, ApacheCon provides an influential platform for dialogue between Open Source developers and users, traversing a wide range of ideas, expertise, and personalities.

ApacheCon welcomes submissions across many fields, geographic locations, and areas of development. The breadth of the Apache community lends itself to conference content that is somewhat loosely-structured, with common themes of interest addressing groundbreaking technologies and emerging trends, best practices (from development to deployment), case studies and lessons learned (tips, tools, and tricks). In addition, ApacheCon will continue to offer its highly popular, two-day intensive trainings; certifications of completion will be distributed to those who fulfill all the training requirements.

Topics appropriate for submission are manifold, and may include but are not restricted to: Apache HTTP server (installation, configuration, migration, and more); ASF-wide projects (including Lucene, Hadoop, Jackrabbit, and Maven); Scripting languages and dynamic content (such as Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, XSL, and PHP); Security and e-commerce (performance tuning, load balancing and high availability); New technologies (including broader initiatives such as Web Services and Web 2.0); ASF-Incubated projects (such as Sling, UIMA, and Shindig); and Business/Community issues (Open-Source-driven business models, open development, enterprise-wide adoption, and more).

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must include:

• Session title
• Speaker name
• Speaker biography
• Session description
• Format and duration
• Audience expertise level

Full details are available online on the CFP page at http://us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/cfp/

Types of Presentations:

• Trainings/Workshops
• General Sessions
• Case Studies/Industry Profiles
• Corporate Showcases & Demonstrations
• Fast Feather (short) sessions
• Birds of a Feather discussions
• Invited Keynotes/Panels/Speakers

Pre-Conference Trainings/Workshops

Held on the first two days of the conference (2-3 November 2009), ApacheCon trainings are available at a registration fee beyond the regular conference fee. Proposals may be submitted for half-day (3 hours), full-day (6 hours), or two-day (12 hours) training sessions. These proposed tutorials should be aimed at providing in-depth, hands-on development experience or related continuing education. Training submissions are welcome at beginner, intermediate, and expert levels.

General Sessions include presentations on practical development applications, insight into high-interest projects, best practices and key advances, overcoming implementation challenges, and industry innovations. Especially welcome are submissions that extend participants’ understanding the role of ASF projects and their influence on the Open Source community at large. General Sessions are scheduled for 50 minutes and are accessible to all conference delegates.

Case Study/Industry Profile

Practitioners are invited to submit presentations that focus on how implementing particular ASF technologies led to improved products/solutions, service offerings, changes in work practices, among other successes. Proposals that highlight overcoming interesting challenges in application design and developing innovative frameworks using multiple ASF projects are particularly encouraged. NOTE: Marketing-oriented submissions aimed at promoting specific organizations or products will not be accepted.

Invited Keynotes/Panels/Speakers

Each conference the ApacheCon Planning team invites select presenters dealing with engaging, dialectical, and challenging subjects to present in keynote and/or panel formats. Topics include cutting-edge technology development, industry leadership, hot or emerging trends, opinions on controversial issues, insight on technology paradigms, and contrasting viewpoints in complementary professional areas. Those interested in suggesting a candidate for an invited speaker opportunity should submit a brief proposal with the speaker’s name, affiliation, background/bio, overview of topics of interest, and contact information.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and Fast Feather Track talks are selected by separate processes, nearer to the beginning of the conference.

Proposals are now being accepted at http://us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/cfp/ and can be revised at anytime until the submissions closing deadline of 28 February 2009.

In addition, sponsorship opportunities for both ApacheCon EU 2009/Amsterdam and ApacheCon US 2009/Oakland are available. Please contact Delia Frees at delia@apachecon.com for further information.

ApacheCon US 2009 is co-produced by the Apache Software Foundation and Stone Circle Productions. The ApacheCon Planning team comprises ASF Members from all over the world working on a wholly-volunteer basis. For more information, visit http://us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/

A Side Note On WordPress, SEO, sitemap.xml and robots.txt

A short and simple look at using a robots.txt file for SEO WordPress blogs.

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Tips and Tricks to increase site speed with .htaccess

One such file is .htaccess. This file can be used to improve your site’s loading time greatly, if mod_expires and mod_headers are compiled with Apache. Apart from this, there is one more simple method; gzip compression (using htaccess). Both are described in this article.

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AskApache SEO part 2: Move urls higher in Search Results

Part II of the Advanced SEO Series shows how to control which urls are indexed in Search Engines and moving higher up in Search Results

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3+ ways to speed up sites that use Google Analytics

Hosting ga.js locally, combining with other javascript files, setting the cookie's domain correctly, replacing the init javascript code.

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.htaccess trick shows Development CSS file only to Developer

I wanted to make changes to the .css file that only I could see, so that my regular traffic and site-visitors would still see the old version. Here’s the elegant solution I came up with using .htaccess and mod_rewrite

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Website Security for WordPress and Drupal

Short, sweet, and solid .htaccess security info.

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A WebServer built with 100 lines of BASH

Piotr Gabryjeluk: 100 lines of BASH script that simply rock!: "Screenshot Tour

#!/bin/bash

function debug {
    local severity="$1"
    shift
    local message="$@"

    echo -n "`date -u`"    1>&2
    echo -ne '\t'        1>&2
    echo -n "$severity"    1>&2
    echo -ne '\t'        1>&2
    echo "$message"        1>&2
}

function fix_path {
    echo -n "$1" | head -n 1 | sed 's|^[/.-]*||' | sed 's|/\.*|/|g'
}

function serve_dir {
    local dir="`fix_path "$1"`"
    if [ "$dir" = "" ]; then
        dir="./"
    fi
    echo 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK'
    echo 'Content-type: text/html;charset=UTF-8'
    echo
    echo LISTING "$dir"
    echo '
'
    ls -p "$dir" | sed -e 's|^\(.*\)$|\1
|'
}

function serve_file {
    echo 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK'
    echo 'Content-type: application/x-download-this'
    echo
    local file="`fix_path "$1"`"
    debug INFO serving file "$file"
    cat "$file"
}

function process {
    local url="`gawk '{print $2}' | head -n 1`"
    case "$url" in
        */)
            debug INFO Processing "$url" as dir
            serve_dir "$url"
            break
            ;;
        *)
            debug INFO Processing "$url" as file
            serve_file "$url"
            ;;
    esac
}

function serve {
    local port="$1"
    local sin="$2"
    local sout="$3"

    while debug INFO Running nc; do

        nc -l -p "$port" < "$sin" > "$sout" &
        pid="$!"

        debug INFO Server PID: "$pid"

        trap cleanup SIGINT
        head -n 1 "$sout" | process > "$sin"
        trap - SIGINT

        debug INFO Killing nc

        kill "$pid"
    done

    debug INFO Quiting server
}

function cleanup {
    debug INFO Caught signal, quitting...
    rm -Rf "$tmp_dir"
    exit
}

tmp_dir="`mktemp -d -t http_server.XXXXXXXXXX`"
sin="$tmp_dir"/in
sout="$tmp_dir"/out
pid=0
port="$1"

mkfifo "$sin"
mkfifo "$sout"

debug INFO Starting server on port "$port"
serve "$port" "$sin" "$sout"
cleanup

The Linux and Unix Menagerie: Using Mkfifo For Monitoring And Enhanced User Activity Logging

The Linux and Unix Menagerie: Using Mkfifo For Monitoring And Enhanced User Activity Logging

NGinx Web Server Cookbook

FastCGI examples

• Simple CGI

• Ruby CGI

• Catalyst

• Mono Server (ASP.NET)

PHP/FastCGI

• PHP/FastCGI Example

• Drupal

• Drupal + Expires + Gzip (polish language)

• Nginx With PHP As FastCGI Howto (with fcgi-start script)

• PHP in nginx on OS X

• Nginx, PHP and a PHP FastCGI daemon init script (with init script for PHP FastCGI)

• DokuWiki

• MediaWiki

Python/FastCGI

• Python CGI

• Python via Flup/FastCGI/WSGI

• Turbogears

• Django

• Django/CherryPy

• Django example

• Pylons

• Zope

Proxying examples

• Load Balancing Example

• Proxying to Turbogears

• Ruby on Rails / Mongrel

• Rails caching with X-Accel-Redirect

• Rails hosting simplified (Using Nginx)

• Nginx & Mongrel Cluster (with a possible start-stop script)

• Nginx as a Proxy to Nagios

Rewrite examples

• A Hack for having multiple if conditions on a rewrite

Tools

• nginx_config_generator

• nginx.vim (config syntax highlighting for Vim)

• Init.d boot-up script for Linux (Original message (imo))

• Capistrano automatic generation of Nginx & Mongrel configuration for VHosts

Mail examples

• IMAP/POP3 Proxy Example

• IMAP authenticated with a PHP script

• IMAP authenticated with embedded Perl

.htaccess trick shows Development CSS file only to Developer

.htaccess trick shows Development CSS file only to Developer: ".htaccess trick to show Alternate CSS file based on IPThis past week I was making changes to my sites apache.css file for a site-redesign. I wanted to make changes to the .css file that only I could see, so that my regular traffic and site-visitors would still see the old version. I quickly came up with an elegant solution using the incredibly powerful .htaccess and mod_rewrite that worked so well I wanted to share it with all you great and interesting people :)"

Simple Wordpress Security Tips

Simple ways to protect your blog from malicious activity.

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Rare and Obscure Penetration Testing Tools

List of mainly obscure security software geared more for the master pentester. These are mostly for unix, bsd, and mac and many are difficult to install and setup (require custom servers, inside access points, obscure libraries). Only programs that output data are included, so no actual exploits or anything. Most of these output extremely useful al

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Simple Wordpress Security Tips

Simple ways to protect your blog from malicious activity.

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Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the hugely successful Wikipedia project, is migrating all of its server infrastructure to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This move reflects the growing viability of Ubuntu for enterprise-scale server deployments.

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How Much Do Top Bloggers & Social Media Consultants Get Paid

The media world is changing and its jobs are changing too. The rise of the blogger is an often-told story, but are the lucky few bloggers who do ...

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Eight Online Places to Learn something New!

If there is one thing I strongly believe is tapping the power of the Internet to learn. It is with always with great happiness that everything I have learnt in the past ten years (since I got online) has been only through tutorial sites.Here are a list of some of that where you can quickly and easily find tutorials, articles and information.

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Mod_Rewrite Variables Advanced Cheatsheet

List of All Variables used by RewriteCond and the actual variables Value for easier rewriting

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Huge Compilation of WordPress Code

If you are a theme designer, or just enjoy customizing your existing WordPress theme, it can sometimes be a hassle digging around for the WordPress code you need. I’ve spent a lot of time on this site collecting various snippets of code since launch and decided that it would probably be more convenient and useful to people if I was to consolidate..

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