XP-rience

Open DNS : Alternate DNS

If you are experiencing problems with your ISP DNS, you might want to try OpenDNS.

Below is how to check whether your ISP DNS availability by using nslookup command

I purposely change the DNS to 202.188.0.133 (TMNET DNS) which is the one that having a problem tonight. Timeout!


No problem when using OpenDNS.


You can set this DNS to your network card setting if you don't want to change your ADSL modem setting.

Easier to revert back to the ISP DNS when it recovers.



More information on OpenDNS? please google for OpenDNS

* Your might also consider Google Public DNS

YUI Compressor with GUI

Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code such as
white space characters, new line characters, comments and block delimiters
without changing its functionality. [read more...]

Minified code reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred through the web server (bandwidth saving).
It may also be used as a kind of obfuscation.

My favorite minification tool is YUI Compressor.
Mostly for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JS (JavaScript).

Let us taka a look what happen when a simple code get minified.

JavaScript - Original Code

function startTime(){
    var today=new Date();
    var h=today.getHours();
    var m=today.getMinutes();
    var s=today.getSeconds();
    // add a zero in front of numbers<10
    m=checkTime(m);
    s=checkTime(s);
    document.getElementById('txt').innerHTML=h+":"+m+":"+s;
    t=setTimeout('startTime()',500);
}

function checkTime(i){
    if (i<10){
        i="0" + i;
    }
    return i;
}

JavaScript - Minified

function startTime(){var b=new Date();var d=b.getHours();
var a=b.getMinutes();var c=b.getSeconds();a=checkTime(a);
c=checkTime(c);document.getElementById("txt").innerHTML=d+":"+a+":"+c;
t=setTimeout("startTime()",500)}function checkTime(a){if(a<10){a="0"+a
}return a};

CSS - Original Code

body
{
    background-color:#d0e4fe;
}
h1
{
    color:orange;
    text-align:center;
}
p
{
    font-family:"Times New Roman";
    font-size:20px;
}

CSS - Minfied

body{background-color:#d0e4fe;}h1{color:orange;text-align:center;}
p{font-family:"Times New Roman";font-size:20px;}

Just to share here, since YUI Compressor don't provide any GUI, I've created one with Java Swing. It has been compiled together with yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar.
You need to have Java installed in order to run this executable JAR.


Download (MD5 : 210176c93d331c50dc19a2dda0ae1c89 JsCssMin.jar)

Using logrotate to rotate and archive log

Previously I found out that rotatelogs cannot replace the rotated logs, I try to find other option.

I always come across logrotate whenever trying to search for rotatelogs.

So I give them a try.

1st step is to find it. BTW, I'm on SuSE Linux Enterprise 10.

$ logrotate
-ksh: logrotate: not found [No such file or directory]

Since it is not in the path, try to find it by doing this.

$ whereis logrotate
logrotate: /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.d /etc/logrotate.conf /usr/share/man/man8/logrotate.8.gz

Now try to run it with full path.

$ /usr/sbin/logrotate

Again, an error occurs.

error: error creating state file /var/lib/logrotate.status: Permission denied

This is because the user that we are currently on don't have write access /var/lib/logrotate.status.

-rw-r--r--  1 root   root  1246 2010-07-28 09:30 logrotate.status

Ask help from system root to change it...

# chmod 666 logrotate.status

...to

-rw-rw-rw-  1 root   root  1246 2010-07-28 09:30 logrotate.status

So, now try again.

$ /usr/sbin/logrotate
logrotate 3.7.3 - Copyright (C) 1995-2001 Red Hat, Inc.
This may be freely redistributed under the terms of the GNU Public License

Usage: logrotate [-dfv?] [-d|--debug] [-f|--force] [-m|--mail command]
[-s|--state statefile] [-v|--verbose] [-?|--help] [--usage]
[OPTION...] 

At last. Now create a simple conf like below.

$ cat ./logrotate.conf
/home/username/test/mylog {
rotate 5
daily
copytruncate
notifempty
compress
}

From my observation by triggering it manually (based on configuration above), I found out that it start by compressing the log file and name it mylog.1.gz.
When I trigger it again, it will rename the mylog.1.gz to mylog.2.gz and create a new mylog.1.gz. It will continue to do that but will not exceed mylog.5.gz (rotate 5 from conf file).

-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  348 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   54 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   59 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   58 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog.3.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   51 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog.4.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   57 2010-07-28 15:32 mylog.5.gz

This is just like what I wanted. It will keep only 5 gz files. Now you can schedule (cron) them accordingly.

Using rotatelogs to rotate nohup.out

Extending my focus on rotatelogs, I was thinking of to use them with other software. This might help me to on how to rotate nohup.out without using cronjob. First, I need something to throw STDOUT. Something simple as below;


Script above will run in infinite loop and echo date output to STDOUT every 2 secs. Next is to test it with nohup so it could survive logout.


Let it run for a couple of seconds and kill it by CTRL-C. Then verify that the nohup.out contains couple lines of date in it. Next step is to pipe it with rotatelogs and observe what happen


Command line above will pipe the STDOUT from the simple test.sh and send them to rotatelogs to be rotated accordingly. nohup.out.%S will cause the nohup.out filename to rotate as below (%S: 2-digit second from rotatelogs)


Oops! Now I relize that the output file will never be replaced. It keep on appending to an old file. Meaning that it will grow and need to be manually archive. :-(

Looking forward to try logrotate and it will be my next post, soon.

Using rotatelogs to manage Logs in Apache (xampp)

While performing a routine XAMPP (under Linux) healthy check, I've found out some log files had grown up to about 8GB. This might cause the system to slow down. Searching for a solution from the net lead me to this, rotatelogs. To use this rotatelogs it needs to be piped in the XAMPP httpd.conf which is located at /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf. So I comment out the 2 original lines and add 2 lines with rotatelogs piped to them like below;


Next is to restart the XAMPP by doing ./lampp restart (XAMPP for Linux). Unfortunately it failed and when I observed the error.log it shows;


Maybe the path is wrong. Next try is to use full path by replace those rotatelogs piped lines with below;


Finally it works. No error in error_log found. New log file will be created whenever it reach 5MB size. Whenever it switch to the new log file, a unixtime will be appended to the log file name like below;


Log file size above is not 5MB yet but when I restart XAMPP, new log file is created. But I'm thinking, what if I don't want to keep all logs, just rotate them weekly. So I try this;


The new log file name now looks something like below.


They will rotate in 24 hours (86400 secs) with a 3-character weekday name appended to them. I assume they will rotate and replace just like I plan in 1 week time, I hope so. :-)

HTTPS traffic on port 8080 is dropped by SecuRemote

After installing VPN-1 SecuRemote/SecureClient NGX R60, my PC is unable to connect to https websites through a port 8080 proxy. Some googling around lead me to this.

Can't view HTTPS web pages

Digging through brought me to below solution;

Re: Securemote blocking access to https pages through proxy.


I've tried it and it works. Just create a new dword regsitry entry as below;



Or you can open your notepad, copy & paste contents below, save it as fix.reg, right click and select Merge.