Monthly Archives: January 2018

Varnish weird error

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Are you getting a weird error from varnish that you’re having trouble working out? Is it cryptically saying that there’s an issue with your host definition in your VCL?

Expected ID got ';'
 (program line 165), at
 ('input' Line 20 Pos 30)
 .first_byte_timeout = 120;
 -----------------------------#

You need to add a time unit to your timeout definitions — ‘s’ for seconds, ‘m’ for minutes.  Stupid cryptic error is dumbly cryptic. Grrr.
https://varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-bugs/2011-August/003983.html

ARGH! A Rant about software developers

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When software developers update their software to include new configuration options, they have a bunch of options to pick from, of how to handle installs running on the old options.

For example, you could

  1.  automatically update config
  2.  document a process to gracefully update config
  3.  Give human readable errors showing what changes you need to make to conifg
  4.  Break the application with a super cryptic error message, and refuse to start until config is wiped with ‘new’ default config.

…

Why do developers keep picking 4? At least 2 horribly complex bits of software in the past year have decided to do that to me, which cost me a few days of head-bashing-against-desk trying to work out what was broken time. 🙁

Varnish nsca logging on systemd system with x-forwarded-for

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So, you have a Varnish server running systemd, which is behind a reverse proxy for SSL like nginx, and you can’t work out how to make varnishncsa log IP addresses from a specified header? Well, it’s a bit of a pain in the neck really. You need to override the systemd service file, which is like systemd’s version of the init scripts. Due to it being systemd, this is not just a case of editing a file…

For Debian, you can use the service file below, and paste it into
/etc/systemd/system/varnishncsa.service

Once done, you need to reload systemd’s service listing itself;
$ systemctl daemon-reload

Congratulations, you now have varnishncsa logs including the visitor’s real IP address, as specified by Nginx. Change the name in “{X-Forwarded-For}” to change the header name, for example if you want CloudFlare’s view of the client’s IP address, use “CF-Connecting-IP”

[Service]
 RuntimeDirectory=varnishncsa
 Type=forking
 PIDFile=/run/varnishncsa/varnishncsa.pid
 User=varnishlog
 Group=varnish
 ExecStart=/usr/bin/varnishncsa -a -w /var/log/varnish/varnishncsa.log -D -P /run/varnishncsa/varnishncsa.pid -F '%%{X-Forwarded-For}i %%l %%u %%t "%%r" %%s %%b "%%{Referer}i" "%%{User-agent}i"'
 ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID

 

mysql/mariadb failing to start under systemd

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If SystemD MariaDB/MySQL is failing to start, make sure your logs directory is set correctly. Sometimes this is caused by failing to correctly make sure the directory is moved.

You’ll see an error log in the journal as follows;

Nov 27 18:24:55 db-a mysqld[28677]: 2017-11-27 18:24:55 140273229838208 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld (mysqld 10.2.10-MariaDB-10.2.10+maria~jessie-log) starting as process 28677
Nov 27 18:24:55 db-a systemd[1]: mariadb.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Nov 27 18:24:55 db-a systemd[1]: Failed to start MariaDB database server.
Nov 27 18:24:55 db-a systemd[1]: Unit mariadb.service entered failed state.