apache posts

I am pleased to say that most of the non-blog parts of my site are now served from static files. I have been working toward making a static version of my site for a while. I have created a PHP static web task that can crawl a site and turn the responses into an Apache friendly directory structure. Those pages now can be served extra fast, without going through PHP, and could be served on a free static host if I wanted. To go static, I not only had to write the code to build the static files, but also had to modify my site code to have the desired output when called from that context and modify my Apache configuration to respond correctly and add some headers that were being added by PHP before.

A while back, I wrote about dealing with the Apache / FastCGI error 'Primary script unknown' when trying to access non-existent PHP files. Bots often do this trying to test for vulnerabilities, and it can fill up error logs and be annoying to look through. In that post, I fixed the problem through mod_rewrite and a RewriteCond. For PHP 2.4+, there is a more broad and likely more efficient solution using the <If> directive. It will work for all virtual hosts on a server.

The xmlrpc.php file of my WordPress blog recently got hit by a single bot some 5000 times over a half hour period recently. I temporarily disabled all visitors and then limited it to just blocking the specific IP via Apache conf (htaccess).

In my web development career, I have countless times needed to look at Apache logs to figure out or find out about problems with sites, monitor activity, or for various other purposes. I've used command line tools to help with this, often looking for strings and counting occurrences. Since I recently needed to create a command string to count unique IP's connected to a given string in the logs, I thought I'd post about it and a few related useful commands.

Somehow, my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 switched the Apache MPM module installed and thus disabled HTTP2 for PHP requests on my server. Continue reading post "#2889"

If you're routing requests for script file names through FastCGI, and don't have some rule to catch requests for unknown scripts, you might find errors like:

Got error 'Primary script unknown\n'

in your error log. Continue reading post "FastCGI and "Primary Script Unknown""

Up way later than I wanted to be, fighting with Symfony's framework bundle trapp…

Looking at a page discussing the code of the first web browser (WorldWideWeb), I noticed a line designating port 2784 as OLD_TCP_PORT. After looking into it a bit more, I determined that this was the port used for the web until port 80 was officially designated in January of 1992. Continue reading post "2784, the first HTTP port"

I recently got h2 (HTTP 2.0) running on my server. Continue reading post "HTTP 2 on Ubuntu 18.04 with Apache and PHP"

I've finally updated my server to Ubuntu 18.04 using do-release-upgrade. Continue reading post "Server upgrade: Ubuntu 18.04"

I spent numerous hours looking into what appear now to be separate gzipping issues / non-issues with my site. Continue reading post "#1724"

Not sure if it was a recent Mac security update or a change with macports, but m…

I decided to contact Dreamhost about my Apache logs showing 200 statuse codes for all mod_rewrite responses. It took seven back-and-forths to get across what was happening, discuss options, and conclude that "DreamHost systems are configured with a default environment meant to meet the most common webapp and customer requirements". Continue reading post "Dreamhost 200 status log conclusion"

I've done some more testing on the problem I mentioned before of all requests showing up as 200's in the Apache log on my Dreamhost shared server. I'm pretty sure it's specific to their mod_rewrite module. Continue reading post "Dreamhost, mod_rewrite, and logged status codes"

On my site, I'm using Apache's 'mod_deflate' and 'mod_filter' to compress my com…