Tag Archives: apache

Running Web Server as a Virtual Machine

Linux, Technology, , , , ,

For several months now I’ve been planning to virtualize my home server. That’s the server hosting this blog, among other things. For starters it would give me some more room to test different applications on separate operating system, but without the hassle of dealing with several physical computers.

One of my ideas is to test web application prior to deployment. This is kind of hard now that I only have one machine. It’s would be shameful if I accidently killed the web service because of a faulty configuration. Also I have a few projects which I want to separate from the machine visible on the internet.

VMware Server is a free product which can be installed on top of either Windows or Linux, so it’s not a bare-metal hypervisor. I recommend running it on top of Linux for minimal footprint, not to mention all the rebooting you have to do with Windows. A minimal Ubuntu server installation takes less than 1GB of disc space, and use next to nothing when it comes to terms of memory.

For the moment I’m doing some testing with one mySQL server, one Apache web server and one server running Varnish, which is a cache/proxy service. It’s not because I’m expecting high load in the near future, but it’s an interesting solution.

Anyway; the next few months I expect this blog to focus more on virtualization, but I can’t guarantee anything. I would be satisfied if I keep writing semi regular, no matter the topic.

Subversion – ‘502 Bad Gateway’ Workaround

Linux, , , , , ,

Parts of this article has previously been posted in my old blog. It’s being reposted because of its usefulness.

A little over a year ago, I had a problem trying both copying and renaming files in Subversion, giving me the ‘502 Bad Gateway’ message. Trying to Google the problem didn’t help me much, and I don’t think it does to this date either.

The error message was:
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: COPY of testfile.py: 502 Bad Gateway (https://hostname)

My solution to the problem was adding the following lines into my vhost-file, between the <VirtualHost *:443> and the closing </VirtualHost>. (I’ve placed them near the top.)

SSLEngine on
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA;+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

You must of course change the SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile variables to reflect your own setup. You must also restart Apache.

I can’t guarantee that this workaround actually will work. But I’ve had good experience with it in two cases. In both cases I’ve run Subversion through Apache 2 web server, using the mod_dav_svn module, on a Linux platform. Also, since I have more than one domain name, the web server was set up with virtual hosts, ssl, proxy and rewrite modules.

According to my original post about this problem, I wrote the following:
I stole this solution from Karl Trygve Kalleberg, who fixed it once, and then later forgot how.
Which, if my mind serves me correct, means that I found it when looking through his old configuration files.