Fall Photos

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Church Picnic

First Baptist Church of Pompano Beach had our 2008 picnic yesterday at Quiet Waters Park in Deerfield Beach.  Check out the pictures.

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Dan and Lauren’s Wedding

Congratulations to our good friends Dan Cohen and Lauren Taub!  They were married October 12 in Lincon, Massachusetts.

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SOAP4R and SSL: unable to get local issuer certificate

After enabling SSL on a couple of apps, I got an email from one of my cron jobs telling me my SOAP API was no longer working.  (This is why you always want to have an entry in /etc/aliases forwarding root’s email to an account you will read)

The error message was “unable to get local issuer certificate.”  I thought, no big deal, there must be an easy way to get SOAP4R to find all the root CA certificates.  Unfortunately it took a while searching Google to find the right answer, so I’m posting it here to make it easier for the next person (which just might be me next week).

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Multiple virtual hosts using SSL on the same IP and Port

Tonight I decided to set up SSL on two internal web apps I’ve been running for a while. I have a wildcard certificate *.stockpr.com just for this purpose. Each app was originally running on a separate hostname on a single IP address on port 80.

After I started setting up SSL, I realized that I might run into trouble because Apache has always said you can’t combine NameVirtualHost and SSL. The reason for this is that the SSL session is established before the HTTP headers are sent. Since NameVirtualHost relies on the HTTP Host header, which is unavailable since it hasn’t yet been sent at the time SSL is being negotiated, Apache can only use a single SSL cert per combination of IP and port.
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Amazon EC2 and “4gb seg fixup”

Tonight I spent two hours banging on an EC2 instance that suddenly went awry. I was adding SSL to a couple of internal applications we host on this instance when my “apache2ctl configtest” command hung. I tried all sorts of things and finally noticed there were tons of entries in /var/log/messages referencing “4gb seg fixup” like this:
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Bundling EC2 Instances and EBS

As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on hosting email accounts on Amazon EC2. I am experimenting with mounting /var on an EBS volume so my database, logs, etc. will survive the failure of an instance.  The idea is to be able to start a new instance, attach the EBS volume containing the /var partition, and keep going where the previous instance left off.  

The first time I tried to bundle the volume I noticed it was taking a very long time.  I had incorrectly assumed that ec2-bundle-vol would automatically exclude any EBS volumes.  Instead, it only excludes a static list of directories, so I had to add the EBS volume (/mail) to the exclusion list.  

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Amazon EBS Snapshot Backups with LVM and XFS

I’m working on setting up a server to host email accounts on Amazon EC2 using the newly released Elastic Block Storage.  My benchmarking has shown XFS to be better than ReiserFS for this task – and presumably EXT3, but I ran out of patience.

Since I will need to grow the filesystem in the future, I am using LVM.  This also allows me to break up the logical volume into separate EBS volumes, which should increase random access performance.   Continue reading

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Dan’s Bachelor Party

Dan’s bachelor party was a blast.  Dan, his dad, me, Taylor, Dan’s brothers Andrew and Jonathan, his cousin Jeff Koch, and Dan’s cousin’s fiance Andrew Margolies spent the weekend in a beautiful cabin in the Smoky Mountains and everyone had a great time.  Check out the pictures.

The camera didn’t come along Saturday when we went whitewater rafting on the Ocoee river (3 hours away) so there’s no proof, but trust me we had fun.  It was a 3 hour drive, but it was pretty driving through the smoky mountains and rural Tennessee.  Plus, how often do you have a food fight at 60 miles per hour?

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Back from Kingsport

Jen and I went with her mom and dad to Kingsport, Tennessee over the weekend.  It was beautiful up there and I got to meet a lot of her dad’s family for the first time.  Here are the pictures…

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