So after yesterday’s post and having seen mod_access_dnsbl (which I still haven’t tried to be honest), I decided to move to Apache instead of lighty.
The reason for this is that lighttpd makes it very cumbersome to add new redirects every time that a site has a broken link to my blog, like OSGalaxy, and it also had a few quirks that started to look awful to me. Also, it was not much able to deal with high load, and spammers got me a lot of high loads lately, yesterday I found the server’s load at more than 60, which is not good.
Now, I know that the problem here was mostly in Typo itself and the fact that it has some crazy stuff, but still, Apache is helping with the situation here, with some things that lighttpd I couldn’t get to properly do.
For instance, the redirection of the huge list of articles that are linked around with the wrong names is now done through a RewriteMap hosted on a berkdb file, which should make lookup much faster. Also, mod_negotiation will allow proper image choice for various browsers together with MultiViews. The whole stuff of redirection that lighty was doing is now replaced by a series of RewriteRules.
And of course Typo is now served through Passenger.
Still there are a few issues left, I haven’t been able to make Bugzilla work with mod_perl for instance. But it’s there at least; and hopefully this way I’ll be able soonish to have it available on HTTPS rather than plain HTTP.
Anyway, I’ve left lighttpd configured so if something does not seem to work properly, I’ll just switch back and look for new solutions.