New Top Level Apache Projects

In an announcement per mail, the Apache Software Foundation announced a number of new top level projects.

Apache Traffic Server is a richly-featured, fast, scalable, and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server.

Apache Mahout provides scalable implementations of machine learning algorithms on top of Apache Hadoop and other technologies.

Apache Tika is an embeddable, lightweight toolkit for content detection, and analysis.

Apache Nutch is a highly-modular, Web searching engine based on Lucene Java with added Web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, and parsers for HTML and other document formats.

Apache Avro is a fast data serialization system that includes rich and dynamic schemas in all its processing.

Apache HBase is a distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable.

Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) is a framework for analyzing unstructured information, such as natural language text.

Apache Cassandra ( an advanced, second-generation “NoSQL” distributed data store that has a shared-nothing architecture)

Apache Subversion a source code management system very often used in enterprise and open source projects.

Apache Click is a modern Java EE Web application framework that provides a natural, rich client style programming model.

Apache Shindig is an OpenSocial container and helps you to start hosting OpenSocial apps quickly by providing the code to render gadgets, proxy requests, and handle REST and RPC requests.

I believe I am becoming somewhat an apache fan boy ;-).

On Top of the Monitoring

So the new trend in naming of projects is to top every thing, in order to imply that these tools are similar to the top command. So the idea is to have a console (text-based) tool indicating what process or activity are currently at the top of their category (e.g memory consumption, processor last)...

So here are the few project I just discovered:

• htop
• innotop
• ApacheTop

And I suppose there are many others.

htop

htop is the closest to (the ;-) ) top, since it is a kind of enhanced top. I tried it. And it was quite nice.

innotop

The name of this one comes from innoDB which is one of the possible backend to a mysql database. I have not tried this tool but I suppose it is like top but just for a mysql database.

ApacheTop

A kind of top for apache request. I think I should take a look, because it might be useful for debugging purposes of our applications.

Apache Problem With IP resolution

One of the apache rule for the resolution of API seems to be that addresses of request cannot be numeric.

I commented the rule out... But I should take a look whether there is no better solution.

To find the rule posing the problem I looked at the logs in: /etc/httpd/logs/error_log.

There was a line:

[Fri May 09 02:09:51 2008] [error] [client xxx.xxx.x.xxx] ModSecurity: Access denied with code 400 (phase 2). Pattern match "^[\\\\d\\\\.]+$" at REQUEST_HEADERS:Host. [id "960017"] [msg "Host header is a numeric IP address"] [severity "CRITICAL"] [hostname "xxx.xxx.x.xxx"] [uri "/ajaxmp"] [unique_id "BFUWMX8AAAEAAA8ewlgAAAAC"]

I then did a grep:

$> grep 960017 /etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/*.conf /etc/httpd/modsecurity.d/modsecurity_crs_21_protocol_anomalies.conf:SecRule REQUEST_HEADERS:Host "^[\d\.]+$" "deny,log,auditlog,status:400,msg:'Host header is a numeric IP address', severity:'2',id:'960017'"

I had found the rule causing the problem and commented it out. I hope there is a beeter solution, perhaps a better rule ???