Gessel On…

Google desktop search works in IE only? It doesn’t work in firefox? I thought their corporate mantra was “do no evil.” Could they be any more evil than that? HOW LAME! I’d buy X1 if it wasn’t having problems with it’s Thunderbird indexing. Why oh why can’t I just have OnLocation back?

So once, long ago, I moved to IMAP on my server. I wanted to move there with my trusty Eudora client that I’ve been using since about 1993. Sure, I flirted with other mail systems, but they screwed me and what I care about most was:

1. Never Lose Data (early versions of Thunderbird were not so good about this for me)
2. Search my several gigabyte database of mail fast enough to be useful.

Now outlook is absolutely intolerable about this last point. Search in all Microsoft products, indexed or not, is so painfully slow one might as well go on vacation. It is incomprehensible to me how it can suck so bad. I remember in 1990 using OnLocation and searching my entire computer (all 20MB of it) in a fraction of a second. Sure it was less data, but it was also doing it on a 33Mhz 68030.

Eudora lets me find my mail. Eudora lets me get my job done. Unfortunately Eudora can’t search an IMAP mailbox unless it is connected. WTF?

OK, time for Thunderbird. But Thunderbird is so not ready for prime time. There’s the massive delays to open any of my larger mailboxes, even to show titles (14,000 messages in a mailbox is NOT too many, who uses this? Kids?) Second it gets confused easily communicating with the IMAP server which tends to lock it up indefinitely. Still, it does cache locally and the built-in search, while interminably slow is faster than Microsoft Search (but doesn’t search across accounts! Hello!). I’m hoping Google Desktop Search will help. Initial results are promising. And Penelope could be very cool. Especially if they add indexed search.

One little change I had to make for Thunderbird was given at this fine site:

perl -p -i -e 's/^MAXDAEMONS=40/MAXDAEMONS=80/g' /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd

perl -p -i -e 's/^MAXPERIP=4/MAXPERIP=40/g'  /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd

Cambridge Fishy… Fishy fishy fishy…

Oh shit! It’s mr. Creosote! Play dead.

I recently did a portupgrade -ra on my server after some period of complacence. It was instigated by having to clean out my mySQL logs after they ate up 30GB of disk space and caused some table corruption.

Anyway, the key details were that
apache+mod_ssl-1.3.37+2.8.28 > needs updating (port has 1.3.39+2.8.30)
php5-5.2.3 > needs updating (port has 5.2.4)
(among about 50 others)

Some foreshadowing.. once I updated and rebooting I get in /var/log/messages only
kernel: pid 1127 (httpd), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
and in /var/log/httpd-error.log only
[info] mod_unique_id: using ip addr 66.93.181.130
every time I “apachectl start” (and after setting apache.config log level to “debug”)

No go.

Much email searching ensued, but Torfinn Ingolfsen on the free-bsd-stable mailing list suggested looking at PHP. Turned out disabling php.so in httpd.conf got apache sort of working, but that was no help, so I thought, eh, why not migrate to apache 2.2.6?

That helped a lot. First the default config didn’t get run with SSL (crash) but that was hinted in the config files

Oct 02 11:30:26 2007] [info] mod_unique_id: using ip addr 66.93.181.130
[Tue Oct 02 11:30:27 2007] [info] Init: Seeding PRNG with 136 bytes of entropy
[Tue Oct 02 11:30:27 2007] [info] Loading certificate & private key of SSL-aware server
[Tue Oct 02 11:30:27 2007] [error] Server should be SSL-aware but has no certificate configured [Hint: SSLCertificateFile]

so I disabled that for the moment. But I was also getting periodic seg faults from Apache. No details (even less than with 1.3.39). Disabling PHP made them go away, but at least apache 2 was self-restarting, so aside from log pollution, no problem…

It occurred to me that my make.conf -O2 compiler specification might be part of the problem, so I changed just that to -O1 and recompiled with portupdate -rf PHP and no more seg faults. 5.2.3 had no trouble with -O2, but 5.2.4 doesn’t seem stable with O2 optimization.

The SSL problem was that /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf had a bit at the end about the following being present to support starting SSL… blah blah, 3rd line from the bottom “SSLEngine on.” It was turning on the engine twice since I was using extra/httpd-ssl.conf already. I commented that line out and everything seems fine now.

The view from my luxurious hotel in NYC. Only $350 a night or so.

Fog! You’d hardly know you were in new York in the blackness.

Wtf is spill resistant to 60 cc?