Tag Archives: code

geek howto

HOWTO: webserver in 100 lines of Bash

September 4, 2008 – 6:48 pm

I’m a big Bash fan, I know Perl is the more popular scripting language, and I’m slowly using it more, but hey, if I need something done, I can do it quicker in Bash (keeping in mind that I’m a systems guy, not a dev guy). While at work looking up Bash related syntax I came across a page describing how to run a webserver with 100 lines of Bash. It uses the old school GNU utility Netcat (nc) for communication between the pipes, and just a ton of basic logic and functions to pass it on to the user. It’s one of those things I look at and can’t believe it works, but it does. Of course security is unknown, as is the original author, but I consider this a reference on how to do networking things in Bash; who knows what I’ll use (parts) of it for. If anyone has details on who originally wrote this I’m all ears.[sourcecode language='xml']#!/bin/bash

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HOWTO: create a pidfile for a startup script

November 8, 2007 – 3:32 pm

On the monit mailing list today someone asked how they could monitor a process that didn’t have a pidfile associated with it.  Without thinking I jotted this down, there’s likely a better way, but this should work and may be all I need for some init.d scripts for a couple of apps on ramon (the home server).  In the the beginning of the startup script, define the PIDFILE with the path and the cmd followed by the pid suffix and then just dump the PID number from the ps output into it:

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Allow Varnish to reuse its shared object

November 7, 2007 – 1:15 pm

Varnish logoBACKGROUND:  The following is a proposal I submitted to the Varnish developers in order to make it simpler to integrate Varnish (an HTTP accelerator for web sites) into production environments.  fak3r uses Varnish in front of its webserver, Lighttpd, so it’s likely that the page you’re now reading was served to you not by the webserver, but via Varnish.

Currently Varnish requires a C compiler to be present on the machine it’s running on, since it needs to compile the VCL config file into a shared object each time it starts. During shutdown, Varnish removes this shared object since it will be rebuilt during the next start. This routine repeats regardless of if anything has changed in the VCL config file, and serves as a road bump to getting Varnish into certain production environments since traditionally development applications (such as the C compiler) are not allowed in such instances. For now I am putting aside the arguments as to why it’s is acceptable to have development applications in production instances, since that argument’s outcome will vary in different situations, and I am aiming for a solution that will cover all instances.

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crash Internet Explorer with a link

October 20, 2007 – 7:09 pm

I thought the days of crashing IE with just some malformed code were over, apparently not. I just takes a misplaced wildcard in a style declaration to send it down.
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input /></table>
This took out IE on my work computer which is fully patched. I’ve read that people running IE under Wine in Linux have it crash as well, so it’s certainly app dependant. For those of you playing at home, just click here to try it for yourself. Extra credit if you actually save the file on your windows machine and then try to open it within Windows Explorer! Enjoy.

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Firefox 2.0 tweaks

October 26, 2006 – 11:29 am

firefox-logo.jpgBy now you should know that if you surf the web, you should be using Firefox. Earlier this week they released version 2.0 with a host of improvements (many small) and some needed polish. While the jump to 2.0 may have been a bit of a reach, the direction Firefox is heading is always interesting. Of course being an open source project there’s always room for tweaking, and while I now take a much more conservative approach to it, I still think changing some things make it (much) better. After a recent post on Digg I reworked a fresh copy of 2.0 to have minimal tweaks that don’t overwhelm or cause instability. Here I’ll document my basic changes and welcome comments on them, or any others that users prefer. (

This is a preview of Firefox 2.0 tweaks. Read the full post (1122 words, 2 images, estimated 4:29 mins reading time)
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