Dreamhost troubleshooting

After checking for the existence of the previous post, I noticed that my blog site was kicking out 403 errors. The specific nastiness looked like this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I checked the apache error logs, and saw a whole bunch of errors like this:

[Tue Jul 17 19:30:22 2007] [crit] [client 208.42.29.115] (13)Permission denied: /home/<my home dir>/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Googling for this error message turned up some misdirection, but no answers. Creating a .htaccess file in my home directory didn't fix it. Even putting one in there that was world-readable didn't fix it; because, of course, that wasn't the real problem.

Turned out that what did fix it was to make my home directory world-executable (which, of course, means searchable for directories), and each of the site directories needed to be world-executable as well. Not world-readable, but world-executable.

[rolls]$ chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o=x blog.pclark.net

Shared hosting happiness is back again, and my apologies for the downtime.

Turning off the E3K

I used to run a Sun E3000 server in my basement. I served up this blog, the DaisyCutter site for my band, several friends web sites, I hosted my own subversion repository, ran my own sendmail and IMAP server, etc... It was pretty neat, having a big enterprise-class machine of my own... you could think of it as a gift from PowerAgent.

I knew it ate a lot of power based on the amount of heat it put off - I'd run it in a 2-CPU configuration in the summer and a 6-CPU configuration in the winter! But then I got a Kill-a-watt power meter, and realized that I was paying around $20.00/mo for the privilege of having a big machine warming up my basement.

So, it's now turned off, and the bits that you're reading are coming from a shared hosting service named Dreamhost somewhere in Los Angeles. I'm paying significantly less for the shared hosting service than I was paying Xcel Energy. It took about a day to get everything moved over.

I feel less geeky now, since I don't have a 6-way SPARC/Solaris box running in my house anymore, but I feel greener.