light serving needs

if you ever have the need to serve a few static pages — say munin output, for example — next to your elaborate "plone/zope behind haproxy behind nginx behind varnish" setup :), here's a quick way to run lighttpd via supervisor using buildout.

with a buildout.cfg like:

[buildout]
parts =
  lighttpd
  lighttpdconf
  supervisor

[lighttpd]
recipe = zc.recipe.cmmi
url = http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.23.tar.gz

[lighttpdconf]
recipe = collective.recipe.template
input = ${buildout:directory}/lighttpd.conf.in
output = ${buildout:directory}/etc/lighttpd.conf
directory = /var/www/munin
port = 8080

[supervisor]
recipe = collective.recipe.supervisor
programs =
  10 lighttpd ${buildout:directory}/parts/lighttpd/sbin/lighttpd [-D -f ${buildout:directory}/etc/lighttpd.conf]

and a configuration template (saved as lighttpd.conf.in) like:

server.document-root = "${lighttpdconf:directory}"
server.port = "${lighttpdconf:port}"
server.tag ="lighttpd"
index-file.names = ( "index.html" )
mimetype.assign = (
  ".html" => "text/html", 
  ".txt" => "text/plain",
  ".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
  ".png" => "image/png", 
  ".css" => "text/css",
  ".js"  => "text/javascript",
  ".xml" => "text/xml",
  ".pdf" => "application/pdf",
)

all you need to do is the following:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/supervisord

after which you can access the contents of /var/www/munin at http://localhost:8080/.

please refer to the lighttpd documentation if you need more than this rather minimal setup...

running out of varnish

just a quick note that might be helpful when running a website through varnish: for at least a year now varnish has had an issue with serving large files. from a given size somewhere around 600mb a "stevedore" cannot be allocated anymore, resulting in an assertion error being raised and a successful, but otherwise empty response. the problem can be worked around using "pipe" to serve the content in question. in the case of plone your vcl might look like:

if (req.url ~ "(/at_download/|@@download$|\.mp4$|\.mov$)") {
    pipe;
}

this works, but is rather crude, of course. you'll need to somehow catch & specify all potentially big content, making it likely to miss some. unfortunately though, varnish only allows to "pipe" from inside its vcl_recv, so it's not possible to check the actual size after fetching the object from the backend, for example...

zope batch undo

here's a quick tip for everyone tired of selecting dozens of checkboxes when trying to undo ZODB changes via the ZMI (or fighting with the batched display of the transactions). i mean, really there should be a "select all" button like in ZMI's folder listing, but until this has been done and released, here's a workaround...

first, and this is only needed once, of course, you bookmark the following javascript-snippet:

javascript:cbs=document.getElementsByName("transaction_info:list");for(n=0;n<cbs.length;++n){cbs[n].checked=true};

then, when you're ready to undo things you get out of the frameset and select a rough number of transactions to undo using a direct link like:

http://localhost:8080/manage_UndoForm?PrincipiaUndoBatchSize:int=200

and afterwards simply click your bookmark to select all checkboxes at once. perhaps you'll still need to unselect the last few or else adjust the number in the link and finally click "undo"...