2012 — 11 September: Tuesday
Well, I don't know who Philip Jones is, but his Brass Ensemble makes quite a pleasing racket.1 Word on the (cyber) street is that today's "Patch Tuesday" offerings will be a lightweight affair. I'll think about that when I have time. First order of business is to get dressed, feed myself, and then disconnect my little server and whisk it across the village for some virtual surgery of its own.
Well, doctor? What's the verdict?
Snag #1: the power supply failed.
Snag #2: Ubuntu server edition now needs (if only during installation) more room than we could liberate.
Down went the thumb.
The funeral service...
... for Wee Whitey the Web Server was a low-key affair, conducted over coffee and a toasted sandwich at Brambridge after we'd discussed the pros and cons of a fresh, ARM-based approach. So the current number of Apache instantiations hereabouts now sinks to two.2
Nil desperandum...
... since, from the ashes of the funeral pyre will — I'm confidently promised — arise a fruity slice of Raspberry Pi, with 8GB, serving (at lightning speed) the static internal pages of my nefarious little 'molehole' enterprise web for me in Technology Towers on about 3 watts (no moving parts). Since Wee Whitey burned through at least 15 watts, just think how green I shall now be. At this rate, I may even be able to afford one hot bath this coming winter.
Server Side Includes are (still) my friends
It's been so long3 since I had any need to consider my use of SSIs that I've just had to re-read one of my own "help" pages! I wanted to convince myself that (in terms of the horrid things the Lighttpd docs have to say about them) I wasn't being too stupid in trying to hang on to them. All I use them for is to embed chunks of invariant HTML that are common to every current page served up by 'molehole'. Thereby decreasing the size of each web page as stored versus its size when actually assembled and served in response to a browsing request.
SSIs stand indicted on three charges:
- the execution of a SSI script is done in the server-core
Mine are such tiddlers, I doubt this has an impact - a long-running SSI script blocks the handling of all connections
Mine are not long-running, and I'm the sole user requesting connections from the internal version of molehole, tucked as it is safely inside my firewall on my local private network - as soon as you use #exec the performance gets worse than using CGI scripts directly
I only use SSIs for (page) content assembling with #include — and that's one of the two reasons deemed acceptable. Phew!
Verdict?
All charges dismissed. Next case!
I can heartily recommend...
... all three novels of the "Hunger Games". Powerful ju-ju :-)