Fubaredness Is Contagious

I recently pushed a Rabbitbal update to Github – http://github.com/somic/rabbitbal.
The biggest enhancement (IMHO) is ability to increase or decrease the number of backend consumers based on any HTTP request headers. In “table” routing mode (see rabbitbal.yml), you can now specify array of tests against which incoming request headers will be matched. This will cause your [...]

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I recently glanced over Apache httpd logs for this blog. Among other things, I discovered several bots that were making quite a few useless requests, thus driving load on the machine. It wasn’t a big deal but a matter of principle. If all of us webmasters start paying attention to misbehaving bots and block them, [...]

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I use Perlbal in one of the systems to reproxy requests to an internal URL. Reproxying to URL is a powerful feature that works like this.

An HTTP request comes to Perlbal.
Perlbal reverse-proxies it to one of its backend servers.
Backend server does some work (in my case, does extensive verification of URL) but instead of returning [...]

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Inspired by Nanite, a very interesting project by Ezra Zygmuntowicz of EngineYard that uses RabbitMQ and eventmachine-based ruby amqp library by Aman Gupta, I sat down and wrote Rabbitbal, a reverse proxy for Rails (as well as other web frameworks, not necessarily limited to Ruby) on top of RabbitMQ. It’s now available on github at [...]

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Those of us who [still] have a PalmOS-based device and use its Blazer browser will probably know that Blazer may take some time to render complex pages, and the end result might not even be readable on a small screen. I recently found a solution to this problem that works great, at least for me.
On [...]

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