Monthly Archives: July 2007

The new world of IMAP

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I realize that IMAP isn’t new, but I just started using it yesterday. I’ve resisted for years as I’ve always had one main store for my email. However, lately, I’m checking email using web based email and everything I’ve heard about IMAP make it sound like it is perfect for using in multiple locations. So far it’s working OK, but I’m getting used to it. For instance, if Mail on my Mac filters messages out of the Inbox, they’re pulled off the IMAP server which kind of defeats the purpose of using IMAP. Most of my email is filtered. I created a rule in Mail that moves all messages < 1 day old into my Inbox and made it my first filter. This should leave everything in my inbox, but when I run the filters over my inbox manually later, it should put everything in the right spot.

Hopefully I’ll get used to this soon; I’ve been using POP3 for close to 15 years ever since I started using Eudora in college. It’s hard to change my thinking, but since I started using POP3 over SSL, I could no longer telnet into my server and issue commands (I know the POP3 commands as I’ve written 2 POP3 email clients in my life), there really is no advantage to me using POP3.

Useless application?

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I downloaded and installed Little Snitch today to give it a spin as it was part of the bundle of software I bought it (which brings me to the question, why did I buy it?, but that’s another story). The program is well implemented, but just about every application makes outgoing network connections these days, so it is always popping up basically saying “xyz application wants to connect to abc server. Allow?” After click always allow more than a few dozen times, I finally disabled it (for now). I’m sure after I train it, it will be less annoying, but how can I really tell what applications are making legitimate requests and which are not? This seems like the little boy who cried wolf.

Speeding up Ruby

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When I setup my store, I sued FastCGI to get acceptable performance which was fine as I don’t get many hits. Today I installed BrowseBack because it came as part of the software bundle I purchase through MacHeist/MacUpdate. As I hit my store a lot to check stats and such, BrowseBack kept loading the store which spiked the server load to 4 and required me to kill BrowseBack to get my server back to normal. While this isn’t normally a problem, it exposed a potential kink in my server’s armor. So I went looking for an alternative. I’ve read about using lighttpd by proxying requests from Apache. Setting it up was straightforward and seemed to work well, until a customer complained that he couldn’t purchase. I tried it myself (again) and it worked fine. I had someone else try again and it failed. Hmmm. After much tinkering, I figured out the problem, my store code required an https connection otherwise it redirected to https which was fine, except that coming from the proxy, it was always an http connection. Since I already do a redirect on my store so that any http://store.receiptwallet.com requests goes to https://store.receiptwallet.com, I can be assured that all requests are secure. So I commented that line out of my store and everything is working fine.

(On a side note, the reason I couldn’t see it myself is that it was checking for local requests and since I access my server using a private IP address range, it basically got flagged as local, so it never required the SSL connection.)

Am I being told something?

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I went to install a new hard drive in my server today to pre-emptively avoid a disaster as the drives in my server have been running 24/7 for 1.5 years and the drives are so cheap, that replacing it should save me time later. I thought all I had to do was power down, yank one drive, power up, partition the new drive, and rebuild the RAID. That is great in theory, but my RAID had errors so when I rebooted, it failed to reboot. I ran fsck on it (after failing to read what the screen told me to do for too long) and let it repair lots of little problems. After that, I was able to reboot and rebuild the RAID. In about an hour, my RAID will be rebuilt and I’ll let it sit for a few days before I go ahead and replace the second drive. With all the problems I have with my server, you’d think I’d learn to just use a hosting service and let someone else manage the hardware. Oh well.