Alex/AT Blog

Patch description:

When using Apache 2.4 behind a load balancer, sometimes need arises to put some virtual host to some other host path. Like you have host http://user1.domain/, but want to also have this host at http://shared.domain/user1/. While linking /user1/ to host root is no problem with trivial Alias on Apache side and rewrite on the balancer side sending requests to http://user1.domain/user1/ instead of http://shared.domain/user1/, it's not complete because any accesses to this virtual host should have shared.domain Host shown i.e. in SERVER_NAME and not user1.domain. This can be of course be obtained by creating shared.domain virtual host on Apache side and mapping all the user paths to it, but most of the time it is not very appealing solution because it requires duplication of all the users configuration, crafty rewrites, etc. And if user virtual hosts run under user credentials, i.e. with mpm_itk, it may be even impossible to combine them all into single virtual hosts.

This patch adds a possibility to set 'canonical' server name to a value supplied in Host header, also this can be done i.e. after mod_remoteip restores proper Host from some X-Forwarded host. This patch just adds host option to UseCanonicalName directive of Apache server to force it creating a canonical name from Host header *after* virtual host is selected.

Example:

RequestHeader set Host expr=%{req:X-Forwarded-Host} early

or

RemoteHostHeader X-Forwarded-Host

(with another patch of mod_remoteip you can find on this blog)

then

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName user1.domain
UseCanonicalName host
Alias /user1/ /www/user1/docroot/
...
</VirtualHost>

That way,  you can send i.e. the following request headers along with /user1/... path for request to http://shared.domain/user1/:

Host: user1.domain
X-Forwarded-Host: shared.domain

And virtual host will be selected to user1.domain user space, while i.e. PHP will see SERVER_NAME as shared.domain.

Download:

httpd-2.4-use-host-as-name.patch

Tested against Apache 2.4.27 in production, compatible with Apache 2.4.28.

Patch description:

When using Apache 2.4 behind a load balancer or proxy along with mod_remoteip, it may be handy for underlying scripts or configuration to know which IP address the direct client (balancer/proxy itself) making the request has. Alas, due to mod_remoteip replacing the IP with the real client IP, this may come tricky. Adding this on balancer is also not always possible because the source IP for connection to HTTP server is not known to balancer at the moment of header mangling.

Also, sometimes it may be handy to make underlying scripts/configuration know about the IP HTTP server accepted connection at, i.e. for multihomed servers.

This small and inobtrusive patch adds two % options to RequestHeader value parser along with the existing ones:

%a - this is substituted with the connecting client IP address, and if used in combination with early option, it provides IP before mod_remoteip does its job.
%A - this is substituted with the IP address of local socket accepting the connection, it provides server IP that the connection is landing onto.

Example:

RequestHeader set X-Balancer-IP %a early
RequestHeader set X-Local-IP %A early

Download:

httpd-2.4-headers-local-remote-ip.patch

Tested against Apache 2.4.27 in production, compatible with Apache 2.4.28.

Recently I have visited Chaos Constructions 2017 demoscene party, held in Saint-Petersburg.

Knowing almost nobody from there, I was just capturing things from both the public and scenic parts of it.

It's may be not a good show for outsider, but those who like demoscene, retro PC coding and stuff should definitely visit it at least once.

Hello everyone

After a while of silence, the site is back. I will fill it with content and projects again with time.

The site is completely in English to stay international, so if you need Russian or some other translation, just use Google Translate.

This is post copied from the old blog that seems to be relevant even now. Basically, those using P400/P400i on ESXi usually hit the major issue: cciss driver provided by ESXi does not support LUNs >2Tb in size while controller itself (with newer firmwares) does. Alas, it's not only driver problem but essentially the ESXi SCSI emulation layer issue is involved and so directly patching cciss driver was impossible.

What's provided there is pair of drivers for ESXi 5.1 (both VIBs must be installed for support to work) that make hpsa driver claim the P400(i) controller and cciss driver to ignore it. Of course, you should have driver support level set to 'third-party' for this to work, effectively making your ESXi system unsupported.

These VIBs were tested for years by multiple people with ESXi 5.5 and even 6.0, and found working. Nevertheless, they are obsolete AF now and always should be used at your own risk only. I hereby propose they come without any warranties and I cannot be made liable for any data loss, broken extremities, major traffic accidents or whatever resulting from your use of this driver set. It is provided only because people still search for it and find it useful.

Download:  esxi-510-cciss-hpsa.zip