How To Add Two-Factor Authentication To phpBB

This document describes how to add WiKID two-factor authentication to phpBB through Apache using mod_auth_xradius. Given the recent attack against phpBB and the exposure of it's users' passwords, we thought two-factor authentication might be timely.

I’m enamored by the middle path.

Basically, the idea is that extremism is an evil and often ideological perspectives are non-optimial solutions.

The Dalai Lama has pursued a middle path solution to the issue of Tibetan independence.

The two opposing philosophies in this situation are total and complete control of Tibet by the Chinese or complete political freedom by the Tibetan people and self governance. The Dalai Lama proposes an alternative whereby China and Tibet pursue stability and co-existence between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples based on equality and mutual co-operation.

How does this apply to Linux?

The current question of swap revolves around using NO swap at all or using swap to page out some portion of your application onto disk.

Even with …

The current size of a MySQL 5.1.30 installation is around 420M.

$ du -sh .
426M    .

A further breakdown.

$ du -sh *
213M    bin
20K     COPYING
9.8M    docs
8.0K    EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT
436K    include
12K     INSTALL-BINARY
121M    lib
504K    man
4.0K    my.cnf
77M     mysql-test
4.0K    README
20K     scripts
2.3M    share
2.9M    sql-bench
100K    support-files

A means to reduce the footprint by 25% is to delete some unused stuff.

$ rm -rf docs/ mysql-test/ sql-bench/
$ du -sh .
337M    .

It’s no big deal, however it certainly does cut down on verbose output in the backup logs removing the mysql-test directory and files.

Yesterday Sun introduced Glassfish Portfolio. Its a new stack of open source middleware products including Glassfish Enterprise Server, Glassfish ESB, Glassfish Web Space Server, and the new Glassfish Web Stack, which includes support for projects such as Tomcat, Memcached, Apache, PHP, Ruby and Python and a copy of MySQL Community.

It’s a pretty complete infrastructure stack. What it is not, however, is an integrated LAMP stack, despite Sun’s reference to it as such not once but twice on its press announcement.

Glassfish Portfolio runs on Linux of course, as well as Solaris, but it does not contain Linux (integrated or otherwise) or Linux services (although that is available …

IP Address Geolocation From MySQL

In this short tutorial I will use a local MySQL database to do IP addresses geolocation.

All change at Sun. A new CEO at Zend. Ingres enjoys revenue up 32%. Purple Labs raises funding. Is open source a danger to Microsoft or will Danger bring open source to Microsoft? (Not) open source food. And more.

It’s a good week for business card printers
There was a rush of new appointment and departure announcements this week. As already noted today, Sun has confirmed the departure of Marten Mickos as Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Earlier in the week Monty Widenius confirmed that he has left Sun, along with …

I just got news that Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO, is to depart Sun amid a reorganisation of its infrastructure and database business units. Don’t expect an announcement from Sun on this, but the news is confirmed.

It seems that Sun is combining its Software Infrastructure organization with its Database Group to form a unified open source product group under the leadership of Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL & Software Infrastructure.

Marten will be transitioning out of Sun by the end of the company’s (current) third quarter.

Marten’s departure is a big loss for Sun and follows quickly after the departures of Monty Widenius and …

Last week we had a team meeting, where we could discuss and plan various issues and ideas for current and upcoming versions of our project.

But finally it’s time to publish new material to show what we were up to in the past weeks. We have our first dual-platform-release of the MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 alpha version.

Please note, that in terms of UI linux- and OSX- version aren’t yet on the same level of completeness. While we are nearly done having all features onboard for the linux-build, we still have some more checkmarks to fill on the osx checklist - but we are catching up. Nevertheless it’s the same codebase - especially the backend-code is the same for all platforms.

Some of you might be missing a release - 5.1.6 for Linux. No, you didn’t miss an announcement: For the purpose of unifying the releases for Linux and mac we simply didn’t publish 5.1.6 last week. It was considered an internal release only and now …

Have you ever been upset by the Linux tendancy to swap… Especially when trying to allocate a large InnoDB buffer pool.. Look at the following output:

yves@yves-laptop:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2041888 1991096 50792 0 52 954592
-/+ buffers/cache: 1036452 1005436
Swap: 975200 1308 973892

There is still 50792 + 52 + 954592 = 1005436 of free memory and Linux starts to swap!!! The reason is hidden here:

yves@yves-laptop:~$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

The swappiness controls the Linux to swap for the File cache. For a file server or a web server or even MySQL with MyISAM tables, the file cache is interesting but for InnoDB or NDB Cluster it is close to useless. Only put a “0″ in that proc entry (echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness) and add …

I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).

Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email raises a valid point about how we determine which companies are considered “open source vendors” and I wanted to use the opportunity to outline the rules I use to make that decision.

As a technical snafu at our end had prevented Tarus from leaving a comment on the blog I hope he won’t mind me using his words to explain the issue he raised.

He wrote:

“You …