Up to Something

In order to get Ahsay working behind and SSL proxy which passes traffic to port 80, you have to modify your conf/server.xml and set a few settings on ol’ Nginx.

Add to your server.xml, non-SSL connector declaration

scheme="https" secure="false" proxyPort="443" redirectPort="443"

nginx config section

    proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:9080;
    proxy_redirect  http://archive.myisteam.com      https://archive.myisteam.com;
    proxy_redirect  http://archive.myisteam.com:80   https://archive.myisteam.com;
    proxy_redirect  https://archive.myisteam.com:80  https://archive.myisteam.com;

.....

Apart from that, it’s perfectly normal

Special thanks to Cliff Wells. For Tireless effort in the face of java.

Thanks as well to the Apache Documentation efforts. Tomcat Connector Docs

I hate Apache. I really do. I refuse to vindicate that hatred. There are great aspects about it, but the things I want to do are hampered by things like the sewer-refuse-styled configuration syntax.

I like Nginx. It is fast, simple, and is amazing. It does proxy, reverse proxy, rewrite, ssl, and everything else. Cliff Wells cooked up a wiki. As linked before, it cleans up when facing off with Apache, Pound, Lighttpd, etc. It has all the core features that sane people need.

I just wrote a recipie for Trac + Nginx over at Edgewall. Trac + Nginx + PostgreSQL Kicks ass.

Note: I still use Apache for moddavsvn, and a mod_python only application. (But that will be fixed soon enough). SVN is another question entirely.

Cliff Wells is up to Good Stuff (tm). There is now the Code Mongers wiki to help translate it into other languages.

My good buddy Cliff has been solving various problems with WebServices. We have been working for the last few years on sorting out Apache, Cherokee and Lighttpd. Cliffs vicious tongue has recently been laid to the trunk of Lighttpd. At the recommendation of the venerable Bob Ippolito, we are leaving Pound, Apache and Lighty.

Apache was a little dissatisfying and sent us looking for a lighter-weight solution. It’s ok, the configuration sucks sweaty linty donkey balls, and the modules are at best a little strange. Bob points out that high-load can be a problem for it. I have a general distaste for Apache that is due in part to my Gentoo experience. Apache is slow to build, dependent on external packages, and on Gentoo the config has always been a nightmare. (And RedHat, and Debian, and it’s just a sh*tty config style altogether).

Lighty seemed fast and simple, and the config file looks like a LUA script. Lots of people, especially the RoR crowd tout it. First it was strange problems with complex config files. Then we found that a single site-per-instance works very well with Lighty. It’s light enough to make it happen well also. The real problems began with the fourteen or so patches issued for 1.4.10. It was some crazy high number. Then came the fact that the only developer works on MySQL. Not terrible, but neither of us are impressed in any way with MySQL. However, the Lighttpd project seems to be failing to attract new core developers. Recently Cliff highlighted problems reported by Bob Ippolito in his article Goodbye Lighty. Hello Nginx. I don’t know if the term scathing applies, however Bob’s impressive talents failed to unravel the mess that is Lighty internals. The short view of his statement: "One problem with Lighty is that it leaks memory like a sieve [1]. I audited it for a little bit and I gave up, it's a mess. I'd steer clear of it, it will quickly ruin your day if you throw a lot of traffic at it." Thats done.

Next on our list was Pound the venerable tool for clustering Zope. It’s multi-threaded nature gives it tremendous speed, but it too falls down with 400+M of memory consumption under high load.

Last week Bob recommended nginx. It’s pretty compelling how quickly Cliff was able to get it up and running. Since starting, he has gone from initial excitement, to determined motivation, to actual productive work.