Edin Kadribašić - Computing

More N95 Gadgets

nospam@example.com (Edin Kadribašić) — Sat, 05 May 2007 19:39:47 +0200

It came through the mail today and its being added as the latest gadget in my collection. It's a Nokia SU-8W wireless keyboard. Much more detailed review can be found here.

Serendipity on Lighty

nospam@example.com (Edin Kadribašić) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:45:32 +0200

I have been moving some of my sites around and the turn came to my blog. Since I have decided to try lighttpd on my new server I was wondering how easy would it be to setup Serendipity on it.

Well the basic install went pretty smoothly, but I wanted, of course, to use "friendly" URLs. For that Serendipity supplies .htaccess file with Apache mod_rewrite rules. With a little bit of effort it was possible for me to convert those into rewrite rules that lighttpd would understand:

# Serendipidy rewrites

  url.rewrite-once = (

        "(archives/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\._!;,\+\-]+\.html)" => "index.php?/$1",

        "(authors/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\._!;,\+\-]+)" => "index.php?/$1",

        "(feeds/categories/([0-9;]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\._!;,\+\-]+\.rss)" => "index.php?/$1",

        "(feeds/authors/([0-9]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\._!;,\+\-]+\.rss)" => "index.php?/$1",

        "(categories/([0-9;]+)-[0-9a-zA-Z\._!;,\+\-]+)" => "index.php?/$1",

        "archives/([/A-Za-z0-9-]+)\.html" => "index.php?url=/archives/$1.html",

        "([0-9]+)[\-][0-9a-zA-Z\-]*\.html" => "index.php?url=$1-article.html",

        "feeds/(.*)" => "index.php?url=/feeds/$1",

        "unsubscribe/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=/unsubscribe/$1/$2",

        "approve/(.*)/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=approve/$1/$2/$3",

        "delete/(.*)/(.*)/([0-9]+)" => "index.php?url=delete/$1/$2/$3",

        "(admin|entries)/(.+)?" => "index.php?url=$1/$2",

        "admin$" => "index.php?url=/admin",

        "archive/?" => "index.php?url=/archive",

        "(index|atom[0-9]*|rss|b2rss|b2rdf).(rss|rdf|rss2|xml)" => "rss.php?file=$1&ext=$2",

        "(plugin|plugin)/(.*)" => "index.php?url=$1/$2",

        "search/(.*)" => "index.php?url=/search/$1",

        "(serendipity\.css|serendipity_admin\.css)" => "index.php?url=/$1",

        "index\.(html?|php.+)" => "index.php?url=index.html",

        "htmlarea/(.*)" => "htmlarea/$1",

        "(.*\.html?)" => "index.php?url=/$1"

  )

We only need to prevent some files from being sent to the user:

url.access-deny = ( ".tpl.php", ".tpl", ".sql", ".inc.php")

I guess the future will show how many security holes I have opened playing with these regexs

Don't buy 3ware SATA RAID cards

nospam@example.com (Edin Kadribašić) — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:06:45 +0200

They suck. If you have stumbled on this rant via some search engine let me tell you, there is no fix for its performance problems. Junk the card or try to lear to live with it.

I was unfortunate not to do proper research when I ordered 3ware 8506-4LP card last year. I had nothing but trouble since. It takes forever to initialize so if you want say RAID-10 over 4 250 GB disk it would take about half a day. To be fair you can still work with the array, but the performance is going to suffer. I guess I was spoiled by 1 hour array rebuild with IBM ServRaid SCSI RAID controllers.

The worst thing about 3ware cards is catastrophic write perfomance. I could not get the card to write more than 6 MB/s. To add insult to injury just copying files from one dir to another would take the system load to 2. Many people have reported similar issues, its all over the web. 3ware people seem to blame everyone else but their poor design.