A great example of Windows' evolutionary drawbacks

If you have ever tried working through an NSA guide on securing Microsoft IIS you will appreciate how many internal systems exists under the hood of Windows and their many deficiencies. For those that have been fortunate to not go through the experience Richard Stiennon uses some compelling visuals by Sana Security to explain why Windows is less secure than Linux because of its long evolutionary history. This history has seen one set of functionality bolted in place over another with little or no thought to the clarity of the overarching system architecture. Consequently whilst Windows works what goes on under the hood is not pretty and very difficult to secure.

Setting up Awstats in an OpenSUSE 10 Apache vhost

Installing awstats is easy in OpenSUSE through Yast. Unfortunately only half the job is done if you wish to activate it for a certain virtual host.

Firstly in the vhost configuration file add the following parameters:

Alias /awstatsicons /srv/www/icons/awstats
ScriptAlias /usage /srv/www/cgi-bin
<Directory "/srv/www/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -Includes   
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory "/srv/www/icons/awstats">
        AllowOverride None
        Options None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Getting Rails up and Running with Apache2 on SUSE

After some Googl'ing, reading and playing about I have got Ruby on Rails running on my SuSE 9.2 server. The process was made difficult by the need to compile quite a few different pieces of software from source and configure mod_fastcgi (which has not been worked on for a while). If you are stuck on this subject take a look at the tutorial here:

http://www.stress-free.co.nz/node/163/59/

Rails, Apache2 and SUSE

Getting Rails up and running on Apache2 on SUSE is takes a little work as at the moment Rails is not part of the the SUSE software updates network. This means you must build Rails (and Ruby if using SuSE < 9.3) and the FastCGI development kit from source.

1. First off it you need Ruby 1.8.2 (or greater) to run Rails. If you have a version less than this you will need to compile and install Ruby from source.
Install GCC, make, the C devel, zlib and zlib-devel packages using Yast.
Download the latest version of Ruby from http://www.ruby-lang.org/
Untar the source file to /usr/local/src, compile and install (as root or sudo):