Category: Apache


Borderline Scamming being done by software companies

Filed Under: Apache, ASE, Databases, IBM DB2, Microsoft, misc, MySQL, Oracle, OS, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite, Sybase by Jason L Froebe — 21 Comments
December 22, 2008

The latest craze from software vendors to companies is to charge for each and every core a machine has regardless of whether or not you’re going to use it.

Get this, if you want to buy a production license for your database/middleware/web server, the vendor (starts with an “S”) wants you to send them the hardware specs of the box.  If you tell them it is a Dell superduper server with 8 quad core CPUs and 96GBytes of RAM but you only will be using a single core for the database and devoting the rest to the middleware/webserver, you STILL have to pay the vendor for all 32 cores (8 CPUs X 4 cores).  Your software license costs is now 32 times MORE what you should have to pay IMHO.

Lots of software companies are now doing this anti-customer practice just to beef up their short term revenues.

What makes them think that you won’t go to another vendor?

  1. Their competitors are probably doing the same sales tactic
  2. They have you by the family jewels, vendor lock in, and it will cost you far too much $$$ to migrate
  3. They think that you’re too stupid and/or timid to call their bluff
  4. FUD that is spread by well meaning and well known folk that don’t know jack about the open source alternatives

Who the hell do they think they are?

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Minor bug with Sybase’s Workspace 1.7 regarding directories starting with a ‘.’

Filed Under: Apache, Mason, Perl, Sybase, Workspace by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
April 17, 2007

I’ve been using Sybase’s Workspace 1.7 for developing and maintaining a myriad of maintenance scripts, web pages, and other interesting things.  I ran into an interesting issue that is worthwhile to take note:
In most of the 3rd party plugins, the .components directory properly shows up in their perspectives.  For example, the EPIC plugin shows the .components directory in the project with no problems.
The EPIC Perl module's perspective shows the

None of Sybase’s eclipse plugins show the .components directory.  I believe this is based on the assumption that since Workspace only runs on windows, that dot directories are rare or nonexistent.  This is a minor bug but one that people should be aware of in case you think that Workspace ate your directory.  ;-)
Any of the Sybase plugin Perspectives don't include the .components directory.

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Apache 2, mod_perl 2 and security (Apache2::Const)

Filed Under: Apache, mod_perl, Perl by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
September 12, 2006

Problem:

I want to send a 404 (not found) error back to the browser when any ".*" or "*.mas" or "*handler" files are requested.  The example in the Mason book is for mod_perl v1 and so far, I haven’t been able to find a working example of how to send the 404 return code using Apache2::Const in an apache .conf file.

This wasn’t a small issue because it was a security hole that may have allowed for the viewing of the web page code and/or sensitive information.

Solution (/etc/httpd/conf.d/perl-HTML-Mason.conf):

<FilesMatch "(\.mas|handler)$">
    SetHandler perl-script
    PerlResponseHandler "sub { use Apache2::Const qw(NOT_FOUND); return NOT_FOUND }"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "^(\.)">
    SetHandler perl-script
    PerlResponseHandler "sub { use Apache2::Const qw(NOT_FOUND); return NOT_FOUND }"
</FilesMatch>

Notice that the Apache2::Const perl module is loaded in the anonymous subroutine and not preloaded.  Apparently mod_perl 2 doesn’t allow for Apache2::Const to be preloaded in the apache config file.

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