All posts by Brian

Apache mod_deflate

Personal,

Last week I was trying to forward apache requests from my WAN address to my test server and coming up empty. This evening I had an opportunity to do a little debugging. It has been a while since I’ve needed to forward those and I’d rebuilt the server on the back end since. So when pages wouldn’t load from the WAN but were no problem from the LAN I figured it was a access issue on the router. With the router config verified I went to the apache error log and found the following:

[Wed Jun 02 17:35:59 2010] [debug] mod_deflate.c(615): [client x.x.x.x] Zlib: Compressed 45 to 38 : URL /index.html

I didn’t think apache would care about compressing/uncompressing the data it’s serving but that is what mod_deflate is for. I don’t need that feature, this is not a production situation and I’ll turn off the port forward in a few days. So I edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf and commented out what’s between the <IfModule> tag then restarted.

Problem solved !

Water, and lots of it

Personal, , ,

Late Friday (4/30) the forecast called for rain most of the weekend but I don’t think anyone was ready for what we got. When it stopped Sunday afternoon around 4:30pm, things were not good. The tally for the Nashville area was 15 inches, more in some places.

As it rained on Saturday morning I didn’t think anything of it, just another spring rain I thought. But when we were in the basement watching the hockey game and water started coming in, we knew we had a problem. The power went out shortly after that, around 3:00pm, and at the time all we could do was move stuff and work the squeegee. What I wouldn’t know till later is our trouble was nothing compared to others even in our own neighborhood.

I left to go to Home Depot about 5:00pm picked up a wet/dry vac for when the power came back on, and another squeegee. When I got back home and pulled into the subdivision I drove through about 6 inches of water, 24 hours later the landscape would be completely different. We used the wet/dry vac late Saturday when the power came back on for a little bit but thankfully not since. For our problem I dug a small trench behind the house Sunday morning which helped route the water around the side and kept it from getting in the basement.

The first pic below is from our front porch Sunday (5/2) morning. The second pic is what the entrance looked like Sunday (5/2) at around 4:30pm. For anyone that’s been by our place know we’re close to the Harpeth River, but not that close. The tree line in the distance is Hwy 70 and the other side of the tree line is the Harpeth River. There are a half dozen homes in our subdivision that have flood damage, others in the greater Nashville area are far worse. Power was restored Monday (5/3) around noon as the guys from Dickson Electric used a john boat to get out to the transformer, amazing.

It has been a weekend to remember, for sure. I only hope things will get back to normal soon.

The third pic here is the entrance this evening.

Raining on 5-2 Entrance 5-2-2010 Entrance 5-4-2010

What’s the password for your passwords

Personal, ,

A few weeks ago I took some days off and went to Utah for a little skiing with friends. I skied two days at Powder Mountain and one at Snowbasin it was a great time. I can’t remember when ski rental and lift tickets were $70 a day, hopefully I can get back there again soon. It was one trip I didn’t take my laptop, just my Nokia 810. It worked pretty well but the wifi was not the best where we were staying, so I suppose taking the laptop would have been moot anyway.

When I got home I needed to check a few things, most importantly pay some bills. This is where I ran into a problem. I use KeePass to store all my usernames and passwords as well as letting it generate a password for me, there are some rare exceptions. It is an excellent program and has served me well over the years. For access it requires a password and when I got back from my trip, since I had not used it for a while, I forgot the password. It was actually kind of funny at the time, here I was using an application that encrypts and stores passwords that I couldn’t get into cause I forgot my password !!!.

All was not lost I really did know the password, just couldn’t remember the right combination. I did find it, made a clear text copy and put it in a secure place… just in case. I’ve debated for a while on changing my philosophy, in case something like this happens, but just haven’t done it yet. Of the various methods out there the one I like the most is keep passwords written down or in a text file somewhere easily accessible but what’s recorded is incomplete. Yes just writing the true password down would not be that secure. The theory is a unique sequence of characters, easily remembered by you but not common to your identity, in the beginning middle or end of password completes it. That way you have the 8, 10, 12, etc characters that one can’t remember for the 20 or 30 accounts written down but you and only you know what’s missing to complete the password.

Maybe one of these days I’ll do that.

GnuCash XML Parse Error

Personal, ,

Some time ago I found GnuCash to replace Quicken for keeping track of finances. It escapes me how long I’ve been using it but regardless it has served us well. Yes Kay is using it too. So last year when I moved back to Windows, Win7 RC, for a work machine I installed the Win32 version of GnuCash. I don’t need it for work, Kay was using it too. It worked well accept for a dll error we click past when starting which has not been a big deal. But do to the end of life on the release candidate I needed to load a production version of Win7 or get a new machine. I mentioned in a in a previous post I’m not to keen on $300.00 for Win7 Pro so the option of a new machine seemed reasonable. In the end I chose a new machine. I hadn’t anticipated a problem just install on the new machine, copy the folder that held the compressed xml file backups and transaction logs, run and open the compressed xml file and were done. That’s not exactly how it went.

I now realize why I was probably getting the dll error now. I’d been running the 2.3.7 development branch not the 2.2.x production. I’m not sure how I did that, none the less it seems to be the reason for my troubles. When opening the compressed xml in the version I just installed, 2.2.9, I received a parse error. At first I didn’t get to excited as I’ve yet to run into real problems with open source where there hasn’t been an answer. So the research began.

I found many posts on the problem but nothing that pointed to a solution. A solution that didn’t include reverting to a previous backup and then re-running transaction logs that is. I have enough trouble entering receipts I’d hate to think what I’d screw up re-running umpteen transaction logs… I don’t think so. After more searching I came across GnuCash to QIF a Java conversion utility that takes the existing xml file and converts it into a QIF (Quicken) file. Seeing as though opening the compressed and extracted xml both failed I figured lets see if we can convert it to a Quicken file and then import it back in.

And what do you know …. it worked like a charm.

Thank you GnuCash to QIF. A “bone head” move on my part running the development branch code on our “real” data. I’ll need to pay attention in the future but once again open source and the internet have taken care of me.