The joys of Apache webserver and modules

I've been fighting an issue with Apache 2.2.8 on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Codename Hardy Heron) to get my Subversion repository to authenticate over LDAP for work. We had previously set it up on Apache 2.0 on Gentoo. It was a week long battle, but we got it working. I figured that since we figured it out on there it should be a pretty straight forward approach this time around. Yeah, that was wishful thinking!

Doing the standard Google searches I came across the step by step guides of how to configure it (most were building from scratch). With the beauty of apt-get I had everything I needed in no time at all (Seriously wish there was a Windows alternative to that...). I created the repository for Subversion, configured Apache and Subversion to start up automatically, and added in the Subversion modules to Apache (which threw me off as it was a link in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled to /etc/apache2/mods-available). Restart Apache and everything still worked so it was time to configure a location for the repository. So following the standard layout I found on every other Google search I set it to the following:

<Location /repos>
  DAV svn
  SVNPath /path/to/repository
  AuthType Basic
  AuthLDAPEnabled on
  AuthLDAPAuthoritative on

  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride None
  order allow,deny
  allow from all

  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  AuthLDAPBindDN "cn=Subversion User,dc=domain,dc=com"
  AuthLDAPBindPassword UserPassword
  AuthLDAPUrl "ldap://domain.com:389/dc=domain,dc=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectclass=user)"

  Require valid-user
</Location>

I go to restart and I get a marvelous error message of:

Invalid command 'AuthLDAPEnabled', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not  included in the server configuration

It wasn't until some repetitive googling later that I came across this amazing post that provided some insite:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/124011-apache-ldap-authentication.html

With a little ingenuity, I figured out the correct set up for us was this:

<Location /repos>
  DAV svn
  SVNPath /path/to/repository
  AuthBasicProvider ldap
  AuthType Basic
#   AuthLDAPEnabled on
  AuthzLDAPAuthoritative on

  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride None
  order allow,deny
  allow from all

  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  AuthLDAPBindDN "cn=Subversion User,dc=domain,dc=com"
  AuthLDAPBindPassword UserPassword
  AuthLDAPUrl "ldap://domain.com:389/dc=domain,dc=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectclass=user)"

  Require valid-user
</Location>

Now to actually continue on with why I had to set up another Subversion server...

Highly Dorky Nerd King

So came across this interesting little test via Continous Learner RSS (http://spietrek.blogspot.com/2007/09/nerd-test.html). So I'm a nerd and I'm proud!

TV costs you at least $10,000/year

Came across an article about how TV costs you more than you may currently realize. In all honesty I never thought about it in terms of my worth, but I made the move to drop the expense of TV over two years ago. I ended up becoming a big fan of Blockbuster Online because at the time I had a store just a couple miles down the road from me. When they switched their business model to allow for the in store movie exchange I became hooked. Forget about Netflix where I might be able to see three movies a week, with Blockbuster I'm able to catch up on six a week (three from my online queue and three from the store). Lately I've been so busy with work that I don't even bother with trading the movies in at the store.

Although I haven't gone in the direction of making use of this extra free time from lack of TV, I do value the time away to not let my brain just rot. I've also noticed a funny thing about society in my lack of TV viewing: people form a lot of conversation around what's on TV. There's been several times when coworkers have asked me if I saw a TV show or even a commercial that was on the night before. That's when I remind them of my TV viewing habits and the conversation falls into silence. Some point me to Youtube to catch the commercial, but that I've tried to avoid as well. User generated content is all well and good, but the quality of that content leaves a lot to be desired and how much of it is actually education or beneficial in some way? I'd have to say almost none, but I'd be happy if somebody could prove me wrong.

Login experiences for the standard end user

So I was making my way through my long self made RSS feed of webpages to read through and several of the pages were ones that require me to create an account on the site. Now in true Web 2.0 experience some of them allow you to browse around the site, even start adding personalized content without creating an account first. This in and of itself is a very cool trick I wish more content driven websites would embrace. But this isn't the point that I'm trying to make. The point is when it actually came time to create that account. Many people pick out a username for an online account and then stick with it at every other website they create an account at. This would be all well and good except there's no standards on what are valid characters in usernames and even passwords. I can't use symbols in my username or my password? Or numbers? Okay then, I'll just stick with something like 'password' to log into my account since you're asking to have my information stolen easily. Seriously, it's not that hard to accommodate those characters. And especially in the password since the site should be using some sort of cryptography anyways so that anybody going into the database can't see the password in plain text or be able to reverse the password.

For the username I can't see a purpose for explicitly denying symbols and in some cases numbers either. Unless the site is making use of symbols behind the scenes to state that a username has special attributes to it, there's no reason to deny the symbols. And if the site is doing this, they really need to reevaluate what they're trying to achieve because this kind of programming trickery just leads to headaches down the road.

So one solution that I've come across that works much better than remembering odd combinations of nonstandard usernames is to use a common email address as the username. Since I've come to focus all my email through one solution (namely Gmail), it's easier to remember what email address to use. Plus with a number of sites that send out the occasional reminders or notifications to the email address I can go to the site and be able to remember right away what the username and (generally) password are for it. What gets annoying is when sites explicitly make use of the email as the username, but don't label the text box as such. One of those tips that most developers keep overlooking: if it is hard to use, it will hardly be used.

And people wonder why politicians aren't considered intellectual...

Okay, I just found found this article on Tech Dirt that's talking about a proposed bill in New York that'd ban people from using an electronic device while crossing the street. Are you kidding me? A couple people kindly remove themselves from the gene pool (without even trying for a Darwin Award) and this is the way to "fix" the problem. Anybody who is backing this bill is saying that people are too stupid to pay attention to their surroundings. While their at it why don't they propose that all cars should have audio distractions removed from them before they can be sold in the US. Even better, anything that can cause a driver to take their eyes off the road (like a billboard) should be illegal. That way there's absolutely NO possible way people can be distracted and cause injury to somebody else with a vehicle.

Seriously people, what is this world coming to? Has common sense really been tossed out the window? I like to think that with the advancing sciences that humanity is getting smarter, but things like this really make me question that...

Quote from 1984

[on the subject of Newspeak] "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered in only six words--in reality, only one word."