Apache Interview Cheat Sheet

I put this together for a friend as a sort of 30-second overview of things I think you should know for a job interview. Obviously, if you're going for a position as a full-time Apache admin you'll need to know more but if Apache is just one of many requirements then I think this is helpful.

Lingo to know:

httpd.conf - configuration file read on startup of Apache
modules - provide additional functionality to Apache such as SSL, PHP, etc.
directives - These are the individual configuration options in the httpd.conf (List at bottom)


Drupal Random Image Block

I have a website devoted to Italian horror movie posters and I wanted a way to add a block in the righthand sidebar that would display random images.

There were a couple of problems with this. Just displaying a random image is not difficult using the image_get_random function but I wanted a way to specify galleries to use. I wanted to have one block that chose a random image from my giallo movie collection. I wanted a second block to pick movie images from two other photo galleries - either "Italian Horror Films" or "Other Italian Films".


Creating a Code Example Block for Drupal

I'm sure this is documented somewhere on http://www.drupal.org but I couldn't find it so I thought I'd document it here so I can remember what I did.

I was looking at a way to highlight code blocks, as well as output from both Unix screens and command line windows, inside of Drupal entries. This makes those sections stand out from the rest of the text of your article like so:

This is what the code block should look like


Troubleshooting “Too many open files” Errors in Weblogic

(The examples in this document will specifically deal with Weblogic 8.1 running on Solaris)

A process uses a file descriptor both for opening a network socket and opening a file, so when we receive the “Too many open files” error it could be a problem related to either of these. The first thing to check is how many file descriptors you are currently allowing for the Weblogic process.


Grep for Windows

For Unix lovers who find themselves trapped inside a Windows command line window, you may find the findstr command useful. It functions just like grep and has many of the same options. Here are a couple of examples:

C:\>netstat -an | findstr LISTEN
TCP 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING
TCP 0.0.0.0:135 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING
TCP 0.0.0.0:445 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING


Windows SSH Keys

Logging Into a Unix System from Windows Without a Password

Wouldn’t it be great if you could open a putty session without entering your username and password everytime.  You can do this by saving your password in putty but a better way is to setup ssh keys. Once you have the key, this can be setup for a variety of