World of *Nix

As i work with some bangla sites, it’s very common problem for me to create eot of bangla true type font. Today i got a really simple solution. Now (As just learned the system) you can create or convert eot from any ttf font from mac or linux with simple one line command.

$ ttf2eot < fontname.ttf > fontname.eot

That’s all!!!! .

Wait, little work left, you have to install ttf2eot :
in mac os x: sudo port install ttf2eot
linux : download the latest source from http://code.google.com/p/ttf2eot/downloads/list , extract it, then run make in the extracted folder. then you good to go. “./ttf2eot < input.ttf > output.eot”

From last few months i am working to optimize our somewhereinblog.net server, because right now we are getting huge amount of hits everyday (1,00,000 + hits). In this series i will describe the tricks that i learned 🙂

On my first post of this searies i will talk about ETag. Before disable this, first we need to know what is ETags. From wikipedia:

An ETag (entity tag) is an HTTP response header returned by an HTTP/1.1 compliant web server used to determine change in content at a given URL. When a new HTTP response contains the same ETag as an older HTTP response, the contents are determined to be the same without further downloading. The header is useful for intermediary devices that perform caching, as well as for client web browsers that cache results. One method of generating the ETag is based on the last modified time of the file and the size of the file.

In certain situations, ETags may not improve the performance of a web application. For instance, some ETag generation schemes incorporate the file’s inode on the system. The file’s inode is unique to the file only on one specific machine. If a site has multiple servers, each with its own copy of the file (i.e. load balancing), then a user’s request for the same file may get served by a different machine. In that case, the inode will almost certainly be different and, if it is used to generate the ETag, it will cause the file to be re-downloaded.

So, this is not always helpfull for all type of sites. Always remember, if you are not using anything, you should not enable or kept enable on server.

Apache by default enable this ETags. We need to disable this to get better performance. Here i am describing the steps for debian and ubuntu linux.

We will take help from mod_header to disable ETags, so first we need to enable the mod_header (apache module)

sudo a2enmod header

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

this command will enable mod_header. Now open /etc/apache2/apache2.conf with your faviourate browser.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

then paste the under given code to this apache2.conf file

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

now restart the apache2, and check if it working or not. If every thing OK, then you will not see the etags anymore 🙂

For better understanding i am giving you 2 screenshots.

Before ETag disable

After ETag disable:

If you don’t have root access to server, you still can do this from .htaccess , just copy that code to .htaccess instate of apache conf file.

Ask me if you have any question or problem about ETag.

Here i am going to describe how to enable mod_rewrite in apache2.2 -specaily for debian.

In default installion of apache2.2 on debian never enable mod_rewrite default. So you may need to enable .

First install the apache2.2 with this command :
debian user please use “su” before start this process
ubuntu user please use “sudo su” before start this process

apt-get install apache2 (it will install apache 2.2)

on current debian system you can enable mod_rewrite with simple command

a2enmod rewrite

old style, you can skip this portion

now use locate to find if the mod_rewrite.so is availble on your server

updatedb
locate mod_rewrite.so


it will found in “/usr/lib/apache2/modules”

new apache follow some folders to enable and disable mods.
so now do this:

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
touch rewrite.load
gedit rewrite.load (you may use any editor to edit this file)

now paste this following line

LoadModule rewrite_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so

end of old style

Then edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default or /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default (check which one available on your system)

Find the following

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all

and change it to

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
allow from all

and finally restart Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
or
service apache2 restart

OK, you done 😀

don’t forget to comment, if it works or not.

thanks.

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