* * * * *
                                        
                                  Brick walls
                                        
Well, I was going to enable the new feature but three things got in the way:

  1. Last month there was a security audit run against a server [1] belonging
     to one of our customers. Over the past month I harded up the DNS (Domain
     Name Service) servers and the router and the only thing left was to
     harden the server itself. And at this point, it was easier to just set
     up a new server.
     
  1. So this past week that's what we've been doing. Tuesday the machine was
     put together. Yesterday the base operating system was installed. And
     since I just know we'll be doing the “Update Dance” once this thing gets
     certified (despite of what Smirk thinks—any bug in any of the services
     will require an automatic update immediately) I decided to install the
     critical services (Apache [2], PHP [3], OpenSSH [4]) from source just to
     avoid having to rely upon the vendor. That way, I can just download the
     latest tarball, ./configure ; make ; make install (which I find easier)
     than the whole “package manager” crap (“Oooh, sorry. You forgot to
     upgrade your package manager for a whole week and we've moved the
     repository—sorry! Oh, and we're no longer supporting that version of the
     distribution anyway so you're doubly screwed! Sorry.”)
     
  1. It was going along fine until PHP and Ravencore [5] (yes, a control
     panel). PHP because the braindead make install installed the PHP modules
     in the oh-so-intuitive location of /usr/lib/20020429/ instead of
     something semi-sane like /usr/local/lib/php-thisweeksversion/modules/,
     and Ravencore because they only release code in RPM (Redhat Package
     Manager) and because it breaks if you change the PHP configuration file
     after Ravencore itself been installed (because you just realized that
     PHP installed the PHP modules in /usr/lib/20020429/ but it never
     complained about them being missing and the default PHP configuration
     file doesn't bother to even include the PHP modules).
     
  1. That's all I'm going to say about that!
     
  2. I wanted to write to Google [6] explaining my concerns over thier
     AdSense program [7] and how their ad selection can't deal with my
     general purpose (read: “horribly unfocused”) blog and how I'm thinking
     of no longer displaying ads.
     
  2. I don't want to drop out of the program entirely, in the hopes they
     change how it works just slightly. The feature I added (and more on that
     in a bit) won't be of use with AdSense, but it will be with some other
     advertising programs (and frankly, I'm surprised this feature hasn't
     been implemented before—perhaps it has and I haven't come across it, but
     I suspect that isn't the case).
     
  2. I wanted to write to Google first, before revealing the feature, and in
     the process of writing the email, I came across—
     
  3. A show stopping bug!
     
  3. Sigh.
     
  3. And I haven't figured out what triggers it. Oh, it's defintely related
     to the new feature, and it causes core dumps (a seriously hard crash)
     and/or infinite loops which causes the server load to increase. Good
     news is I found a rash of entries that trigger the bug; I just haven't
     had a chance to figure out what exactly is going on.
     

So it may be another day or so before I can go ahead and use this feature.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/12/21.1
[2] http://httpd.apache.org/
[3] http://www.php.net/
[4] http://www.openssh.org/
[5] http://www.ravencore.com/
[6] http://www.google.com/
[7] https://www.google.com/adsense/

Email author at sean@conman.org