Tag Archives: Apache

Progress with MailClark, Slack, FileMaker, WordPress

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Somemotor-1381998_1280times you just have a week where you are grinding away at things, and nothing particularly new or spectacular happens, and no new revelations are on the horizon. This was one of those weeks.

MailClark and Slack

The MailClark experiment is moving into its third week. As I hoped, it  appears to be working well as an application for low-volume  email customer support. In another couple of weeks, I will introduce this to the rest of the customer support team, so that more than one of us can respond to emails and questions sent in to our help address.

FileMaker CRM

Our FileMaker CRM is taking shape. I have built the basic tables, and am working on the data entry screens. I’ve hosted it on a new Mac Mini with an SSD drive using FileMaker Server. This is the first time I’ve ever used an SSD up close and personal (all Linodes are SSD based), and I’m impressed with the speed.

FileMaker has been steadily improving the web client of the application called WebDirect. This is an effective implementation of the regular FileMaker desktop interface, but rendered in HTML5 and CSS for a web browser, which eliminates the need to install the FileMaker software client on your desktop workstation.  My thought is that we will provide access to the CRM via a virtual private networking connection rather than allowing direct access through our firewall.

Similar to FileMaker Go, the FileMaker client that runs on iPhones and iPads, I  expect to build dedicated data entry screens for the web clients. This means that each platform gets its  own screens….desktop,  iDevice, and web.  The startup script for the application will contain a CASE statement which determines which platform you are connecting with, and point you to the correct screen.

So far the data design and use cases appear to be pretty accurate and for the most part remain unchanged. One thing I have done is add a “reference” section. This will provide a front-end for the National Center for Educational Statistics database of public and private schools.

WordPress and Apache

I spent a couple days faffing about with my Apache / WordPress installation, trying to figure out what what slowing down our blog. It turns out to be hidden in plain sight, and here is one explanation.

 

Troubleshoot Apache with mod_status

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We are having a bit of a contretemps with one our of Linode blog hosts. This host is running Ubuntu Linux 12X  LTS and WordPress, and seems to be having fits of high CPU utilization. One way to see into the web hosting process is to examine the Apache mod_status page.

Mod_status is an Apache module which prints statistics about the Apache application. By default the page will be accessible using the the suffix of /server-status on your root web site URL. http://mysite.com/server-status. However, by default this is restricted to a request from a browser at the 127.0.0.1 address.

If you log into the console, you can attempt to see the status by running the following:

apachectl status

or if you aren’t logged in as root,

sudo apachectl status

This returns the status page.

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If you are attempting to access this from a browser on another workstation via http://mysite.com/server-status, you get a 403 message:

Screenshot_071516_110946_AM

The first thing is to find where this restriction is located. It is going to be in one of the Apache configuration files. These are located within /etc/apache2. If the status module is enabled, there will be a status.conf file that can be edited.

sudo nano  /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/status.conf

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Edit the lines after the <Location /server-status> line, per the instructions. After editing mine looked like:

<Location /server-status>
   SetHandler server-status
   #Require local 
   Require ip 192.168.xxx.0/24
</Location>

where “xxx” is your local subnet.  In the above example, I’m accessing the server from inside the firewall from a workstation located on the same subnet as the Apache server. (In reality, I’m actually accessing a server running within a VirtualBox virtual machine, located on my Windows machine. )

Once these changes are made you have to restart Apache.

service apache2 restart

 

If this is successful,  you get a page similar to the character-based page, but nicely formatted in html. Since the data is similar, however, if there is any issue trying to get at the statistics, probably the character-based method at the console is the first thing to try.

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Ah…but what if you get a page, but it isn’t a status page?  This is the problem we have with our WordPress site, and it has to do with which page is served as the default. http://myblog.com/server-status  returns the default page from the blog rather than the server-status page.  Stay tuned for that fix.