Web server stability issues

Posted on by Alexandre Gauthier

We are experiencing some intermittent problems with the web server architecture — applications sometimes stop responding at all and apache seems to become stuck — it also seems to affect the fastcgi module which renders all the non-php web applications unusable.

We have narrowed the problem to a potential culprit: APC, the PHP cache framework we are using in production. We have downgraded to version 3.0.1 and the problem seems to have gone away — but we remain vigilant.

We are carefully monitoring the web server for problems, do report any unexpected behavior :)

Redmine maintenance complete

Posted on by Alexandre Gauthier

Upgrade to Redmine the 1.0-stable completed successfully. Access to service has been fully restored.

Some problems were encountered in regard to gem compatibility with the i18n enabled templates. For future reference the error encountered when rendering i18n’ed templates was:

ActionView::TemplateError (missing interpolation argument in “%m/%{count}/%Y %I:%M %p”

Freezing rails 2.3.5 to vendor and editing vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/vendor.rb to depend on a version of the i18n gem lower that 4.0 fixed it. (i.e. gem 'i18n', '>= 0.1.3','<0.4.0') fixed it.

Also, issues with mod_passenger (404s on /login and sever other pages) when running in a subdirectory were fixed my renaming/deleting the .htaccess file in public/ — it was creating rewrite rules for fastcgi deployments, which clashed with URI routing.

Service is now fully functional and new Redmine features are available.

Mercurial central repository issues [resolved]

Posted on by Alexandre Gauthier

Following an upgrade to Mercurial 1.6, hgwebdir.cgi got merged into hgweb.cgi. We overlooked that bit and the apache integration broke. As of now, it is functional again.

We promptly switched to hgweb.cgi but against what the documentation advertised, it was not a complete drop in replacement and would fail to execute no matter what. We fixed it by hosting it through mod_wsgi for apache.

Mercurial Repository Services are now fully functional again.

So, here we are.

Posted on by Alexandre Gauthier

I finally decided to fill the void of my primary domain with something. This website will act some kind of hub between all the services I run and provide, and the bits of code and knowledge I wish to distribute, regardless of their target audience being extremely limited.

I hope that eventually this can bloom into a google-friendly place where one might find something of  use, or adopt a piece of code I have written.

Since I run quite a bit of services and the amount of people requiring stability, status updates regarding maintenance and documentation specifying how to access them has increased tenfold over the last three years, I thought I could make this site fill that requirement as well, somehow.

In a rather comical display of recursion, considering the description on the front page, I think it’s only fitting — and not without a bit of situational irony — for the website itself to have a such an nebulous, ill-defined purpose :)

Either way, feel free to browse and comments are always appreciated.