OTRS is known as best-of-breed in open source incident management systems. Since quite some time, OTRS made its product ITIL V3 compliant. Means: It also comes with a change management module. At work we use a complex and extremely user-unfriedly software. This brought me to the idea to test the OTRS change management module in order to propose OTRS as a replacement for the currently used software for the Change- Incident- and Problem Management. Incident- and Change Management integration I ….Read More
Category: Web Servers and Applications
IUS Community RPMs for Red Hats RHEL
I was criticizing that software in RHEL is too outdated for web servers quite soon after release, see my blog post http://blog.delouw.ch/2010/05/02/rhel6-as-a-web-server/. While this is true for a system fully supported by Red Hat, I learned an alternative from a comment on the post. This alternative is the so called IUS community repository. About the IUS Community Project The project was launched in September 2009. In spite of being a young project, it has a history. At Rackspace, a large ….Read More
An example why open source software is cool
Recently I have set up an Apache Tomcat. As a replacement for the Tomcat manager I deployed Psi-Probe for easy deployment and access to statistics. Afterwards I installed the production software which needs to add a JVM parameter user.country=CH to have the proper date and time format used in Switzerland. This had a unwanted side-effect to Psi-Probe. The Interface switched to German, no way to switch the language back to English. Since my mother tongue is German, no big deal ….Read More
Apache HTTP server and its further development
The Apache httpd is one of the most stable software pieces which is still in use. The latest huge step forward was with the release of 2.0. Quo vadis Apache httpd? The most current release is 2.2.15. During the 2.2.x release cycle, there have basically been only bug-fix releases (Okay, response header rewrite starting on 2.2.9 is a nice feature). This brings me to the question: What is going on with 2.4? The answer is quite simple: As you can ….Read More
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released
End of April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04 was released. As always it is based on Debian’s Testing-Release. Canonical “stabilizes” the testing tree of Debian and adds its own look. This time, Ubuntu radically changed its look. From my point of view it looks ugly, very ugly. Strange colors, low contrasts in menus, orange icons in Nautilus… window buttons on the left side… At the end of the day an usability-horror. Under the hood Ubuntu is a very stable distribution with recent ….Read More
RHEL6 as a web server
New software versions Today I’m writing about the changes and benefits of RHEL6 as a web server compared to RHEL5. Red Hat is well known for its stable API and ABI over the life-cycle of a major release. For some usage types this is a major problem. Sticking to old version of PHP, MySQL, Tomcat you-name-it-piece-of-software is problematic since web applications are rapidly changing its requirements. Instead of PHP 5.1.6, RHEL6 ships almost up-to-date PHP 5.3.1. Which is good, since ….Read More
A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1
As promised yesterday, I publish the results of a brief test of RHEL6 Beta 1 and the most important findings. It is my point of view as a system guys daily business. If not stated, this overview is based on a default installation with no customization. General There are new package groups such as “Minimal” with 228 Packages and “Basic Server” with 523 Packages. “Basic Server” is the default installation, which means the default click trough installation compared to RHEL5 ….Read More
302 Redirects behind SSL-terminating proxies
You have a web site all with SSL. There is a reverse proxy or load balancer that acts as SSL termination point. Behind that reverse proxy you have an Apache web server running plain http.
Your application uses 302 redirects to announce new URLs or whatever the reason is for doing so. Since the web server does not know that https URLs should be announced the response header looks like following:
Location
http://www.example.com/your-fancy-url
The browser interprets that location header and send a request to this non-SSL URL instead of https:///www.example.com/your-fancy-url