[web-team] Volunteer

[Lisa C]

I do still read from time to time... and happened to do so when
my name was mentioned -- interesting coincidence. :-)

Yah, I know that a lot of the work was sloppy and not deeply
thought through but, if you recall, we were in a rush to get
things moved over (I forget why).  *shrug* We do what we need to
do from time to time.

That said, my not-so-good memory is that there was something
about the PHP (which I would never use these days) that only
runs once a day -- mostly just using includes unless it is run
for the first time in a given day -- or the first time since a
particular file is modified or something like that.

So, the actual overhead, IIRC, is pretty small on each page
load...  But there's a chance that I am confusing this site with
one of the others I have worked on over the years.

If there are any specific questions about a partcilar piece of
code, I would try to answer -- and, frankly, I'd probably be
ashamed of it if I didn't forgive myself for being ignorant at
the time (which I do). :-)

Lisa


On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 05:19:00PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Josef Grosch (jgrosch at gmail.com):
> 
> > No worries. I have assigned the VM 2 IP addresses, 205.166.121.104 and
> > 205.166.121.105. I've installed subversion, ntp, postfix, php, pear, and
> > apache2. After I installed postfix and apache I found the web team web
> > page (after I mirrored the web site) and found that the current
> > installation uses exim and lighttp. I'm sorry but I don't know much
> > about lighttp or exim. I know you are kinda busy but if you could get me
> > shell access, please use my ssh key just grab it from the new server, to
> > the existing server. I can do a bunch of work getting things setup.
> 
> Sure, will do, and thanks again.
> 
> The major reason the www.svlug.org virthost at Linode uses Lighty
> (lighttpd) is that originally went got only 80MB RAM, and VP Micah Dowty
> (who took over when Bill Ward resigned) _seriously_ claimed that we
> should be able to fit all SVLUG operations -- SMTP w/antispam, mailing
> lists, Web site, ssh, DNS, version control -- into 80MB.  
> 
> Micah Dowty and J. Paul Reed were sure of this, and they're Web
> programmers, so of course they Knew Whereof They Spoke.  I'm a mere
> senior system administrator, so what the hell would I know about
> systems, right?  Anyway, we scrimped and saved on RAM, using Lighty
> instead of Apache http, NSD instead of BIND9, and every other possible
> RAM-economising measure -- and of course it was absolutely impossible to
> fit SMTP w/antispam into there with everything else.
> 
> Which is how we got there.
> 
> Lisa Corsetti (/me waves) in her capacity as SVLUG's Web Software
> Coordinator made the unilateral decision to recode a number of the
> www.svlug.org Web features from server-side HTML (headers and footers)
> and Perl scripts (various small page gadgets) into PHP.  Which meant
> that we then bloated Lighty a good bit by making it run a PHP
> interpreter to load every page.  
> 
> I'm not really happen about that for a couple of reasons:  
> 
> (1) It struck me as really odd to go spending RAM like mad after going
> through such pains to be careful with it -- and also I'm not at all sure
> these pages are actually dynamic in nature.  Nothing on www.svlug.org is 
> drawn from a database.  So, granting for discussion that using PHP to
> generate the page is a nice idea, wouldn't it have been smarter to have
> a Makefile that generates static HTML pages, running the PHP interpreter
> at that time, instead of needing a big PHP binary involved with every
> page load?
> 
> (2) When Lisa turned on that feature, she left Ubuntu Server's default
> php.ini in place untouched, which by default left open a bunch of
> ghastly security holes.  I had to scramble to button down php.ini in a
> manner that didn't leave PHP's full feature set lit up like a Christmas
> tree.  More at:
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Security/php.html
> 
> (It should be noted that generating static pages from PHP source using,
> e.g., GNU make and a Makefile means that _no_ PHP security risk is
> present on the public-facing side.)
> 
> I'm not married to Lighty, though it's been really good for the
> www.svlug.org virthost.  I'm guessing that making it also do Mailman's
> Web pages would be no problem at all.
> 
> 
> Anyway, I'd love to see us experiment with doing that better, prior to
> completing migration.
> 
> BTW, I'm not blameless of the needless-PHP-at-runtime error.  Both BALE
> (http://linuxmafia.com/bale/) and my personal FAQ pages
> (http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/) are generated needlessly by the PHP
> interpreter at page load time.  The latter example is particularly
> ridiculous, in that the -only- PHP feature used at all is the include()
> function.
> 
> I did it because it was the easy way to do include files, before
> thinking through the implications.
> 
> One of these days, I should convert that to a Makefile, and turn BALE
> into one done likewise (to generate a static HTML file) invoked by the
> script that populates the events table on the first of every month.
> 
> 
> OTOH, NSD is a _huge_ win over BIND, and I would strongly recommend 
> not using the latter.  You'll be able to see some site documentation
> about NSD when you get shell access.  For now:
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Network_Other/dns-servers.html#nsd
> 
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