I published my fixDAVsvn script seven months (and one day) ago to automate the process of fixing apache configuration files that have been manually modified to serve up Subversion repositories (per Nayan Hajratwala’s instructions) when they’re overwritten by Server Admin. This has made managing my apache install considerably easier, but upon rolling it out on a colleague’s server this afternoon I realized it was only ever a half solution. Sure, I had saved myself considerable time just by running fixDAVsvn, but others aren’t necessarily going to want to and there’s really no need. Time to add the second half.

So, how does one automate the process of running a command on a particular file whenever it’s modified? With launchd, of course! launchd drives some admins nuts, but I find it to be quite a boon and this happens to be exactly one of the cases it was designed for. So, I whipped up /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.makkintosshu.fixDAVsvn.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.makkintosshu.fixDAVsvn</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/local/bin/fixDAVsvn</string>
		<string>/etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_80_svn.domain.tld.conf</string>
	</array>
	<key>WatchPaths</key>
	<array>
		<string>/etc/apache2/sites/0001_any_80_svn.domain.tld.conf</string>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

The full path to the config file to run fixDAVsvn on needs to exist in both the ProgramArguments & WatchPaths arrays in com.makkintosshu.fixDAVsvn.plist. That said, you can add as many config files to watch and fix as you like.

So, the complete solution¹ is to install fixDAVsvn and com.makkintosshu.fixDAVsvn.plist, then edit the latter to watch & fix your modified apache configuration files. I’ll likely package this all up with a script to build com.makkintosshu.fixDAVsvn.plist’s list of files automatically, but it may be another seven months.

¹ This solution has been tested on both Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Server and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Server.

Subversion, mod_dav, and mod_dav_svn are all pre-installed on Leopard Server, authentication via Open Directory is a piece of cake, and you can even mostly config & manage via Server Admin. Nayan Hajratwala has a good tutorial explaining the setup and the few lines you have to manually add to the apache config files, but there’s one problem: whenever you update any site using Server Admin, it replaces all occurrences of ‘DAV svn’ with ‘DAV Off’, completely defeating the purpose.

When I just had just a couple of Subversion repositories and wasn’t changing my apache configs very frequently it was fine to manually switch ‘DAV Off’ back to ‘DAV svn’ and restart apache, but recently I’ve exceeded my tolerance. So, this morning I whipped up the following bash script which accepts the names of config files that’ll need to be fixed, performs the substitution, and restarts apache:

#!/bin/bash

# 
# fixDAVsvn - Replace occurrences of 'DAV Off' in specified apache2 configs with
#             'DAV svn' and restart apache. This helps do some dirty work on Mac
#             OS X Server when using Server Admin to modify apache configs if
#             you use DAV svn anywhere.
# 
# v0.1   - 2009-03-07 - Morgan Aldridge <morgant@makkintosshu.com>
#                       Initial development.
# 

date=`date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M"`

function usage() {
	printf "Usage: fixDAVsvn file [...]\n"
}

if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
	until [ -z "$1" ]; do
		src=$1
		dst=$src-$date.bak
		rsync -a $src $dst	# back up the original file
		cat $dst | sed 's/DAV Off/DAV svn/g' > $src	# replace 'DAV Off' w/'DAV svn'
		shift
	done

	/usr/sbin/apachectl restart	# reload the apache configs
else
	usage
fi

I’d suggest installing it into /usr/local/bin/.

Example usage:

sudo fixDAVsvn /etc/apache2/sites/0003_any_80_svn.domain.tld.conf

Let me know if you find this useful.

Update: I’ve since released a launchd job which automates the process of running fixDAVsvn when the apache config files are modified (esp. by Server Admin).

I’ve been sitting on, and tweaking infrequently, a launchd plist for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (and Server, of course) for launching the Sysmon daemon at boot and keeping it running. Well, it’s time to release it out into the wild, so without further ado:

sysmon-startupitem-0.4.tar.gz

This is an update to my Sysmon StartupItem in that I’ve rewritten the install script to install either the StartupItem or the launchd plist file where appropriate (utilizing the little trick I wrote about a few days ago), plus updates to the documentation and such. It should support Panther & Tiger via the StartupItem and Leopard via the launchd plist. Of course, more details and previous versions can be found on the Development page.

Let me know how it goes if you use it.

I had planned the migration from Tiger Server to Leopard Server for this week, but hadn’t intended to do it today nor during daytime hours. Unfortunately, a DOS attack on UNNA prompted me to go ahead and upgrade so that I could work on alleviating that issue.

About 13 hours later (including a few hours to walk the dog and eat dinner), my Mac mini server is back up and now running Mac OS X 10.5.3 Server. I’ve run into some issues with 10.5.2 Server and earlier at my day job, but this revision seems to be quite a bit better. The migration went very smoothly and some service configurations were just drop-in replacements.

I have yet to start migrating backup scripts and some special services requiring custom Startup Items which will need to be re-written as launchd jobs. Also, UNNA has many PHP 4 to PHP 5 growing pains for me to work through as I’ve been working on migrating it to the Textpattern CMS as of late. I may have to refocus a bit of that effort over the next few days to get it cleaned up again.

I’ll try to describe the funky setup I’ve got in further posts, but here’s to hoping that Mac OS X 10.5.3 Server really does embody many more improvements and will give me few headaches going forward.

Another year, another mta_digg_it Textpattern plug-in update. This time, version 0.3:

mta_digg_it-0.3.txt (see full info)

This release brings some minor updates to the documentation, the compact attribute’s functionality has been moved to the more flexible skin attribute (you can now use either full size, compact, or icon sizes), and you can optionally use the article’s excerpt as the content of the bodytext attribute.

Drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, or bug reports.

While I subscribe to the "Less is more" philosophy, I’m actually pretty poor at adhering to it. I have a major case of information overload in my digital life and junk clutters up both my digital and anolog lives. I’ve been pretty good with the RSS feeds that I subscribe to, I’ve slimmed down this site, and I’ve started attacking the piles of unused computer gear in my apartment.

I’m going to continue whittling away what computer gear that I actually need and use until I reach a perfect harmony, a blissful happiness, or complete enlightenment. This week’s part of that task is the server rack in my living-room.

I’ve done all my web hosting from home for years due to the increased flexibility & control I have over the servers, the challenges I get to face, the practice, and the somewhat lower operating costs (ignoring the labor, of course). However, having a half-height server rack housing two servers, plus a bunch of networking gear, in our living-room for the past few years has grown tedious. It takes up a lot of space, it’s frickin’ loud, and it’s an eye-sore¹.

The current setup consists of:

• A home-built 18U, 4-post, open-air rack
• A Comcast cable modem
• A Dual 2.0GHz Xserve G5 providing web hosting and acting as a gateway/router²
• A 400MHz PowerMac G4 in a Marathon G•Rack, my former media center & file server
• An Intel Express 530T Switch
• A “Snow” AirPort Base Station
• LaCie D2 hard drives (rack-mounted, naturally)
• Rack-mount power strip & cable management accessories

Now, I’m not about to stop hosting from home, but I do want to reclaim some of the space, reduce the noise, and cut the electricity usage a tad. To pull this off I hatched a master plan to consolidate my server and network equipment to one small, quiet 8U desktop rack. The new setup will be as follows:

• A Middle Atlantic DR-8 8U desktop rack (with a couple Middle Atlantic U1 shelves)
• My Comcast cable modem
• A Gigabit AirPort Extreme Base Station which will provide WiFi as well as act as my new gateway/router
• A 1.83GHz Core2 Duo Mac mini which will provide web hosting and act as a file server
• My Intel Express 530T Switch
• My LaCie D2 hard drives
• My rack-mount power strip & cable management accessories

This new configuration will be a hell of a lot smaller, much quieter (there will be only three small fans: one in the Mac mini and two in my Express 530T), and draw much less electricity. An added bonus: the boxes for all the hardware take up less space in a closet than that of just one of my servers. There are also some added technical benefits, as well, including: a better NAT implementation³, support for more WiFi standards, gigabit uplink from my server to my router & network, reduced load on my server, etc.

The cost break-down?

1. Mac mini & AirPort Extreme – approx. $750
2. Middle Atlantic rack & shelves – approx. $90

Well under $1000. I’ll also be selling the PowerMac G4, the 18U rack, and possibly the “Snow” AirPort to further reduce that. Even when I bought the Express 530T switch two weeks ago the net cost to me was only $30 after I sold the switch it was replacing.

I brought home the Mac mini and AirPort on Friday and have already integrated the AirPort into my network as the new gateway. The 8U desk rack and shelves are on order and should arrive sometime this week. The migration of the Xserve’s configuration and data to the Mac mini will be the most time-consuming part of the project and I’ve got plenty of practice doing that sort of thing.

All in all, what will this get me? First and foremost: a much happier girlfriend; but also more space in a cleaner living-room, a quieter living-room (all the better for watching movies in), a lower electricity bill, and a pretty powerful server that I actually own.

I do still need a proper 1U rack-mount UPS, but that’s for later. I know, I know… I live in Vermont so I do really need a long-lasting UPS. Unfortunately, that’d cost as much as this entire new server setup.

¹ Emily’s never exactly been a fan either. In fact, she’s always hated it.

² Graciously loaned by Small Dog Electronics, Inc. for continued development, testing, and training. Fun, fun.

³ The built-in NAT in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Server always tests as “Moderate” on my Xbox 360 and so I get kicked off Xbox Live fairly frequently. The new Gigabit AirPort Extreme’s NAT tests as “Open” and so I have nary a hiccup now.

I’ve released another minor update to my Sysmon StartupItem.

This release enables the ability to disable the Startup Item without needing to actually move/remove it. It now requires that either a SYSMON=-YES- or SYSMON=-NO- line in your /etc/hostconfig file, but this is a fairly common practice/requirement for Startup Items.

Of course, now the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has been delayed until October, I can continue to procrastinate on porting this over to a launchd job.

I’ve updated my mta_digg_it Textpattern plug-in to v0.2 today.

This version includes the following fixes:

1. Correctly escapes apostrophes, quotes, backslashes, etc., when used in the title or bodytext attributes (pulled from the article title by default).
2. Prevents cross-pollination of variables when multiple “Digg This” buttons appear on a single page.

The latest version and full description can always be found on the development page or you can download it directly:

mta_digg_it-0.2.txt

As always, please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or bug reports.

I happened across the fact that Digg has implemented new ‘smart’ digg buttons on the 6th. The biggest new feature here is that you no longer have to first ‘submit’ an article to get its “digg url” to use with the “Digg This” buttons and can now just reference the article’s permalink instead.

With that, it means you no longer have to manually submit articles to Digg, copy the digg URL into a custom field in Textpattern, and have the “Digg This” button pull the URL from said custom field (or, worst case, paste the JavaScript into each and every article manually).

With this in mind, I decided it was finally feasible to write a plug-in to do this (I almost did it for the digg-url-in-a-custom-field solution). So, here’s version 0.1 of mta_digg_it: mta_digg_it-0.1.txt (full description here).

Please send in your comments, suggestions, and bug reports.

Update: Sorry about the broken link, it should be fixed now.

Update #2: Version 0.2 is now available.

It’s odd that I’ve done this seven months, to the day, since the initial release, but today I’ve released a minor update to my Sysmon StartupItem.

This is a very minor release and just improves the implementation of RestartService() as well as moving the install directory to the more appropriate /Library/StartupItems (instead of /System/Library/StartupItems/).

I really need to port this to launchd instead of improving it, but hey, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Disclaimer

This cookbook is intended for those that are atleast slightly familiar with building and configuring unix applications on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. No support is offered and the author is not responsible for any lost data due to following these steps or mistakes made while attempting to follow these steps.

With that in mind, these steps did work for the author and will provide a quick copy & paste solution for those that don’t want to figure out all the steps themselves (although this is a really easy one).

Caveats

Unfortunately, the CLI is currently broken on Darwin/Mac OS X in OpenPBX RC2, so that reduces its overall functionality considerably.

OpenPBX RC2 also requires editline, so you’ll have to build that as well (see instructions below). RC3 and the current trunk in Subversion will use readline and so can be linked to version of readline included with Mac OS X.

Preparing the Build Environment

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir openpbx-build
cd openpbx-build

Building & Installing LibTIFF

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
pushd pushd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
popd

Building & Installing SpanDSP

curl -O http://www.soft-switch.org/downloads/spandsp/spandsp-0.0.3pre27.tgz
tar -xzf spandsp-0.0.3pre27.tgz
pushd spandsp-0.0.3
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
popd

Building & Installing Editline Library

curl -O http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/libedit-20061022-2.9.tar.gz
tar -xzf libedit-20061022-2.9.tar.gz
pushd libedit-20061022-2.9
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
popd

Building & Installing OpenPBX

curl -O http://www.openpbx.org/openpbx.org-1.2_rc2.tar.gz
tar -xzf openpbx.org-1.2_rc2.tar.gz
pushd openpbx.org-1.2_rc2
./configure --enable-iax-trunking=yes --enable-t38=yes --prefix=/usr/local/openpbx
make
sudo make install
popd

Allowing Communication with the Outside World

Open the following ports in the firewall (via Server Admin.app):

• “iChat – Session Initiation Protocol” (UDP port 5060)
• “iChat – audio/video RTP & RCTP” (UDP ports 16384-16403)
• “IAX – Inter-Asterisk eXchange” (UDP port 4569; you’ll need to add this one to the list)

Reference

• http://www.openpbx.org/
• http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=OpenPBX.org
• http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/OpenPBX.org+How+to+build+on+OSX%252FDarwin
• http://wiki.openpbx.org/tiki-index.php?page=BuildNotes
• http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix/additionalfeatures/chapter_10_section_9.html
• http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/
• http://www.soft-switch.org/downloads/spandsp/
• http://www.soft-switch.org/installing-spandsp.html
• http://lists.mactelephony.net/pipermail/mac-telephony-list/2006-December/000043.html
• http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/

Download This Cookbook as Text:

Cookbook – OpenPBX RC2 on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Server.txt

Note: This cookbook is based on building Asterisk 1.2.10 on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Server somewhere as of August 15th, 2006. It should work for Tiger client as well, but I definitely won’t guarantee it.

Disclaimer

This cookbook is intended for those that are atleast slightly familiar with building and configuring unix applications on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. No support is offered and the author is not responsible for any lost data due to following these steps or mistakes made while attempting to follow these steps.

With that in mind, these steps did work for the author and will provide a quick copy & paste solution for those that don’t want to figure out all the steps themselves (although this is a really easy one).

Caveats

Although Asterisk compiles cleanly and functions pretty well on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (Client & Server), you will have to configure and administer it from using CLI as there is no easy-to-build GUI or web interface.

Also, due to a lack of support for Zaptel (and other) drivers and hence support for hardware PCI cards, some functionality that requires timing interrupts from PCI cards will not work properly (if at all). Including:

• IAX2 “Trunking”
• Music-on-Hold
• Conferencing using MeetMe

However, if you’re running a smaller Asterisk setup and don’t need conferencing or Music-on-Hold, then you should be fine and experience few issues.

The author suggests that you keep an eye on OpenPBX, which was forked from Asterisk 1.2, as it is being developed specifically to address these types of issues and promote platform neutrality.

Preparing the Build Environment

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir asterisk-build
cd asterisk-build

Building & Installing Asterisk 1.2

curl -O http://ftp.digium.com/pub/asterisk/releases/asterisk-1.2.10.tar.gz
tar -xzf asterisk-1.2.10.tar.gz
pushd asterisk-1.2.10
make clean
sudo make install
sudo make samples
popd

Allowing Communication with the Outside World

Open the following ports in the firewall (via Server Admin.app):

• “iChat – Session Initiation Protocol” (UDP port 5060)
• “iChat – audio/video RTP & RCTP” (UDP ports 16384-16403)
• “IAX – Inter-Asterisk eXchange” (UDP port 4569; you’ll need to add this one to the list)

Starting Asterisk

If not using a Startup Item, you can manually (or using your own scripts) run the following command to start the asterisk daemon:

Stopping Asterisk

If not using a Startup Item, you can use one of the following commands to manually shut down asterisk gracefully (see asterisk help for other less-than-graceful options):

sudo /usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'stop when convenient'

sudo /usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'stop gracefully'

Reference

• http://www.asterisk.org/downloads
• http://www.digium.com/en/docs/asterisk_handbook/downloading_compiling.html
• http://www.digium.com/en/supportcenter/documentation/viewdocs/asterisk_handbook
• http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk
• http://www.asteriskguru.com/

Download This Cookbook as Text:

Cookbook – Asterisk 1.2 on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Server.txt – 2006-12-22

I wrote a quick Textpattern plug-in today to spit back a “URL title” for an article ID instead of the numerical “ID” that <txp:article_id /> does and called it mta_article_id. Basically it’s intended to be a replacement of article_id.

I needed it to be able to implement human-readable anchors for articles in sections (for example the autobiograpy and colophon parts of this site’s about section) that aren’t sections that one would really “browse” (so no permalinks), but are mainly fake static pages. In fact, I had intended to have this functionality before I posted my holiday wish list, but I couldn’t find a way to extract just the “URL title” that appears at the end of a Textpattern “Clean URL” permalink (atleast not without writing some custom PHP code).

I asked around on the Textpattern support forum and one kind soul pointed me to this post by one of the moderators describing exactly what I needed.

So, I downloaded the Textpattern plug-in template (see Anatomy of a Textpattern Plug-in for more details on Textpattern plug-in development), and merged the moderator’s code (basically a one-liner) with that of the implementation of the built-in article_id in taghandlers.php (another one-liner), and—Voilà!—my first Textpattern plug-in.

Of course, I discovered that there’s now an <article_url_title /> tag as of Textpattern 4.0.5, but I’m still running 4.0.3. So, my plug-in was depricated before it was released, but the mention of article_url_title only appeared on December 1st, right in the middle of when I was first working on getting “URL titles”, so I guess it’s excusable.

Regardless, you can download mta_article_id from the development section if you like.

Update: It turns out I had overestimated which version Textpattern is currently at. It’s currently only at version 4.0.4, so although version 4.0.5 will include the article_url_title tag my plug-in is still needed in the meantime.

Note: This cookbook is based on building MRTG 2.14.7 on Mac OS X 10.4.8 (Tiger) client as of October 31st, 2006. It should work for Tiger Server as well, but you’ll want to check to see if libpng is pre-installed or not.

Disclaimer

This cookbook is intended for those that are atleast slightly familiar with building and configuring unix applications on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. No support is offered and the author is not responsible for any lost data due to following these steps or mistakes made while attempting to follow these steps.

With that in mind, these steps did work for the author and will provide a quick copy & paste solution for those that don’t want to waste ten minutes figuring out that the --without-fontconfig flag needs to be set when running configure for gd.

Reference

• http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
• http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/doc/mrtg-unix-guide.en.html
• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
• http://www.boutell.com/gd/
• http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Workbench/2001-11-13.01.html

Setting Up the Build Environment

cd ~/Desktop/
mkdir build-mrtg2
cd build-mrtg2

Building & Installing libpng

curl -O http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.12.tar.bz2
md5 libng-1.2.12.tar.bz2
tar -xjf libpng-1.2.12.tar.bz2
pushd libpng-1.2.12
./configure
make check
sudo make install
popd

Building & Installing gd

curl -O http://www.boutell.com/gd/http/gd-2.0.33.tar.gz
tar -xzf gd-2.0.33.tar.gz
pushd gd-2.0.33
./configure --without-freetype --without-jpeg --without-fontconfig
make check
sudo make install
popd

Building & Installing MRTG:

curl -O http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/pub/mrtg-2.14.7.tar.gz
md5 mrtg-2.14.7.tar.gz
tar -xzf mrtg-2.14.7.tar.gz
pushd mrtg-2.14.7
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mrtg-2
make
sudo make install
popd

Closing:

That’s it, you’re done. You can delete the ~/Desktop/build-mrtg2/ directory once you’re confident that MRTG is working as intended and you won’t have to rebuild any part of it.

Download This Cookbook as Text:

Cookbook – MRTG 2.14 on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).txt – 2006-10-31