With my move to my new house/office, and with Amnet offering static IPs on their ADSL 2 plans it has become time to retire my trusty Alcatel ADSL modem and WRT54G modem/router combination. I went through this process about a year ago when I blew the power supply on my WRT54G and was not impressed with the quality of many of the routers out there. Instead, I modified another power supply and got a UPS (I learnt my lesson)
Anyway, my luck hasn’t changed. Amnet offer a Siemans SpeedStream 6520 with their accounts, so I thought I would give it a go. As far as I can tell, this modem/router is only being offered by Telstra and Amnet as a package and as a result, you can’t purchase it from a retail store.
Problems:
- The router doesn’t seem to handle persistent connections well. If I open an SSH session, it will often drop out after a period of inactivity - using the PuTTY “keep-alive” feature fixes the problem, so it isn’t the quality of my connection. The same occurs with my Outlook IMAP connection. Very annoying.
- It doesn’t support port forwarding beyond DMZ - not a huge problem, but I liked this feature of the WRT54G
- For some weird reason, my VoIP software - eyeBeam, can’t connect through the firewall. It’s little brother, X-Lite works fine, but eye-Beam is so much better I’m quited annoyed at this. Note this may not be a problem with the router, but it worked fine with the WRT54G.
I’ve asked for a refund for it and have ordered a Linksys WAG54Gv2 which is the combination big brother of the WRT54G. Hopefully Linksys is on other winner with this product. I’ll let you know.
Australia Day is my favourite holiday of the year. What has happened in previous years is we would all assemble at Trashy Central for the world famous potato salad contest. It is amazing how, when you say you are having a potato salad contest, ever persons response follows the lines of “I make the best potato salad EVER!” Judged by the party host, the winner gets taken to the restaurant of their choice.
Then down to the foreshore to watch the fireworks, whilst the host stays back to prepare for party: Stage 2.
The party continues once everyone meanders back up.
What happened this year? I worked. It was for a UK client, so cries of “But it’s Australia day!” went unheeded. So I spent the day in front of my laptop, with the TripleJ hottest 100 blaring.
I did mange to finish by 6 and walk down to Maylands (Just down the road now that we are in Mt Lawley) with Giovanna and her family to watch the skyworks - so not all was lost. Still would have been nice to hang with the Knutsfords though 
Next year - I’m partying!
I have fallen victim to the fastcgi zombie process issue. It would seem that there is a problem with FastCGI running under apache2, where many zombie processes can not be killed, which eventually fills up the process table, slowing down the server. My guess is that is using up all of the sockets, thus stopping any other processes from taking connections (THis is speculation as I haven’t really investigated fully)
Any way - after a quick google, I found that other people have been successfully using the fcgid module, which is a binary compatible replacement for mod_fastcgi. Generic instructions can be found on this blog - however, the following instructions are suitable for Gentoo - it also allows you to use the .htaccess file, giving a finer site control:
1. emerge mod_fcgid (I used the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ to get the latest version)
2. edit /etc/conf.d/apache - add the flag -D FCGID
3. modify the virtual host in the apache.conf file to include:
Options ExecCGI
and
DefaultInitEnv RAILS_ENV production (For production mode obviously)
4. modify /etc/apache2/modules/20_mod_fcgid.conf to include:
IPCCommTimeout 40
IPCConnectTimeout 10
(I put it immediately after the LoadModule directive)
5. modify the AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi line in [Rails_app_root]/public/.htaccess to read:
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
6. Restart Apache.
I’ll keep you posted on whether it fixes the problem 
One of my projects required tagging, and I was about to write my own engine, when I can across this article. This library from the article turned adding tags into a five minute job.
Kudos to Dema, the developer of it.
I’m working on a site that allows users to create password protected accounts (Pretty much like every other website around) and I needed a way to check that the password field and confirm password field were the same.
I saw this as an opportunity to play with plug ins
You can download the validates_equality_of plug here.
Instructions for use:
- Untar the file into the plugins directory of your rails application
- You now have access to the validates_equality_of method
Easy!
The method is called in the following manner (assuming you have fields called password and confirm_password)
validates_equality_of :password, :with => :confirm_password
You can override the message in the usual way by supplying a :message attribute.
Hope someone find it useful.
