Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

New Content/Layout OK?

Varnish Proxy

Silly me, a poll would not work on the new server. I forgot that with the Varnish cache proxy at the front almost all visitors arrive from the same IP address (the proxy), which means that Drupal would allocate just one vote to all (except registered and presently logged in users). With Drupal upgrade we can perhaps find polling software that overcomes this.

rpaf

You must use mod_rpaf to fix this problem that Varnish introduces.
See eg https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2008-September/016470.html
mod_rpaf for EL6 64bit here: http://centos.alt.ru/repository/centos/6/x86_64/mod_rpaf-0.6-2.el6.x86_64.rpm

Proxy

Thank, we will look into it. Currently, a lot of stuff other than the poll (e.g. views being counted) are not compatible with Varnish and it makes it look as though not many people visit and can participate in the site.

For sheer stats you could use

For sheer stats you could use an external (i.e. not cached by varnish) service, such as Google Analytics or run your own Piwik.

Piwik

Google Analytics is spyware, but Piwik would be a possibility (Stallman recently told me that it's good). Can it be installed on a cache proxy? I'd have to gain access to it first. Either way, this would not facilitate per-post page request count. Susan had it set up with a module, but it's no longer working correctly. In turn, rating/sorting posts by popularity is no longer possible, and that's the real downside (the front page can no longer list popular items for today).

The problem is not just that IP addresses are not unique. Some requests are never seen by the CMS and Apache.

For the non-unique addresses

For the non-unique addresses look at mod_rpaf, it was made for this situations.
Is this drupal6 or 7? With 6 varnish integration sucks from what I've seen.

See also
https://drupal.org/project/varnish
https://fourkitchens.atlassian.net/wiki/display/TECH/Configure+Varnish+3+for+Drupal+7

Agreed on Google Analytics. You can just install Piwik on the same host and tell Varnish either not to cache it or you can just set its virtualhost on a port other than 80 so it bypasses Varnish completely.

Varnish

Thanks for the pointers.

Yes, it's Drupal 6 and there are other issues that I am beginning to see, such as lack of updates from the RSS feeds around the page (I am currently investigating this, maybe it's related to a cron job or module config although I very much doubt the latter as I haven't changed configs).

Non-unique addresses could be bypassed as an issue even by writing random IP addresses, but that would enable easy poll rigging. I guess it's not essential for operation of the site, but it's a nice-to-have...

From Drupal.org: "This module provides integration between your Drupal site and the Varnish HTTP Accelerator, an advanced and very fast reverse-proxy system. Basically, Varnish handles serving static files and anonymous page-views for your site much faster and at higher volumes than Apache, in the neighborhood of 3000 requests per second."

I have had such issues with Varnish on top of WordPress and MediaWiki (pages served improperly from cache) and it all makes me wonder if removing Varnish altogether is the best way to proceed.

As for Piwik, I have never tried it before, so I will look into it.

I would keep Varnish on for

I would keep Varnish on for static files (css, js, jpeg etc) and to clean up HTTP traffic (Varnish will not forward incomplete or malformed HTTP requests to the backend, it should also be the front line against synfloods etc).

Here's a sample of what I use (test it first, I'm just beginning with Varnish myself)

director default dns {
.list = {
.port = "8080";
.connect_timeout = 5s;
.first_byte_timeout = 600s;
.between_bytes_timeout = 600s;
.max_connections = 10000;
"172.16.1.53"/32;
}
}
sub vcl_recv {
if (req.url ~ "\.(png|gif|jpg|swf|css|js)$") {
return(lookup);
}
}
sub vcl_fetch {
if (req.url ~ "\.(png|gif|jpg|swf|css|js)$") {
unset beresp.http.set-cookie;
}
if (req.restarts == 0) {
if (req.http.x-forwarded-for) {
set req.http.X-Forwarded-For =
req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip;
} else {
set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;
}
}
}

Then install mod_rpaf and make sure your Apache is listening on port 8080 and add this to /etc/httpd/conf.d/rpaf.conf:
LoadModule rpaf_module modules/mod_rpaf-2.0.so

RPAFenable On
RPAFproxy_ips 127.0.0.1 IPs_OF_THE_SERVER
RPAFsethostname On
RPAFheader X-Forwarded-For

PS: looks like drupal is messing with my comments, here's a text version http://fpaste.org/74672/raw/

Thanks

Thanks, I will look at it and into it in the weekend.

RSS feeds

The Piwik demo looks impressive, I have just given them a word of endorsement.

I am still trying to resolve some other issues we've identified.

I think I found the source of the issue above (RSS feeds). It seems like any external site access is denied by default, which helps explain why RSS feeds cannot be retrieved by the Drupal part of the site:


[root@tuxmachines ~]# wget lxer.com
--2014-02-05 04:34:37--  http://lxer.com/
Resolving lxer.com... 108.166.170.174
Connecting to lxer.com|108.166.170.174|:80... failed: Connection refused.
[root@tuxmachines ~]# wget linuxtoday.com
--2014-02-05 04:34:54--  http://linuxtoday.com/
Resolving linuxtoday.com... 70.42.23.121
Connecting to linuxtoday.com|70.42.23.121|:80... failed: Connection refused.

Looks like a firewall issue

Looks like a firewall issue at the first glance.

Firewall

Nux wrote:

Looks like a firewall issue at the first glance.

Yes, it was a simply issue to tackle. It works now.

Pageview count and polls

I'll have a look and see if configuration can solve not just the polling issue but also pageview count. The site of this module is down and it seems like it may require configuration on the cache server too.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.