Mark's Blog

Twitter: Blogging for the attention span of the SMS generation.

Twitter: Bloggen für die Aufmerksamkeitsspanne der SMS Generation.

Just some days ago I’ve written about my problems proxying IIS by Apache, having ultimately used Squid. Having Squid in front of Exchange has worked for OWA, but users using Outlook to connect Exchange have been asked for their credentials over and over again. In other words, “Outlook does not stop asking for username and password”. (It should only ask every start.)

Therefore I’ve changed Apache to listen on another port for SSL (here 8443) and have let IIS/Exchange use port 443 exclusively. ISA would have changed that issue, but it was overhead as I’ve written.

But, you can to reverse proxy with IIS 7!  Read more »

Tags: apache, exchange, IIS, regexp, Squid

Thanks to some little scripts for Gentoo by Dennis Muhlestein you can start your TurboGears applications automatically at system’s startup under Gentoo. In case you’re too lazy to read his entry, here is what to do (enriched by my ideas):

1. create a init.d template in /etc/init.d as follows, name it cherrypy and grant execute rights to everyone:

   #!/sbin/runscript
   
   depend() {
           need net
   }
   start() {
           su -l $APPUSER -c "screen -S $SESS_NAME -d -m $APP_DIR/$SCRIPT_NAME"
   }
   stop() {
           su -l $APPUSER -c "screen -S $SESS_NAME -X kill"
   }
   

2. make a link to it, naming it similar to your application

   ln -s cherrypy hsyssite

3. create a configuration file in /etc/conf.d for this application with following settings:

   APPUSER="mark"
   APP_DIR="/home/mark/WebApps/HsysSite"
   SESS_NAME="hsyssite"
   SCRIPT_NAME="start.sh"
   

4. put that start-script in the application’s directory (named start.sh):

   #!/bin/bash
   #PATH=/home/the_user/bin:$PATH
   
   cd `dirname $0`
   ./start-hsyssite.py prod.cfg

5. don’t forget to add it to the default runlevel!

   rc-update add hsyssite default

Thank you, Dennis!

Tags: Gentoo, turbogears

Worth a bookmark is Steam’s hardware survey, by which you can compare your system to other’s gaming Valve games. Very handy in case you are going to buy a new graphics card, what recently I did.

ATi has disappointed many customers buying a 4850, 4870 and other cards which sucked 70 watts in idle mode alone. In my case that was more than my entire system (w/o the graphics card) consumed alone.
Having sold it I bought a HIS ATi HD 3450 for its low power demand. Unfortunately, that was not a good pick because this card was only sufficient for working but far too slow for occasional gaming (e.g., Audiosurf) or even Photoshop CS4’s OpenGL feature.

Given my problems with ATi’s drivers I decided to go for something from nVidia. Despite that and after much research about performance and power consumption (excellent post, indeed) I ended up with a Sapphire ATi HD 4670 (review, recommendation). It was the best at performance for energy ratio (my Vergleich Grafikkarten) with as low as 9 watts in idle. (BTW, see this power supply calculator.)
Its cooling is hearable in my rather silent machine, but mounting Accelero S1 rev 2 solved that.