Tales from beyond the .network

serra.me

10. January 2020 by Lothar

Apache2: mod_autoindex and UTF-8

For my ScummVM nightly server, I’m using the apache2 module mod_autoindex. I noticed that – even though I enabled UTF-8 support in the apache configuration – one vHost was still served with ISO-8859 encoding.

The problem is that the autoindex module simply ignores the global charset settings. Instead, it insists on using ISO-8859 for the vHost without further configuration.

In order to enable UTF-8 for sites generated by mod_autoindex, the parameter Charset=UTF-8 must be added to the IndexOptions of the specific vHost configuration.

2. January 2020 by Lothar

Gentoo: using git for portage

By default, Gentoo is using the rsync protocol to distribute it’s portage tree. For synchronizing a lot of smaller files, this protocol is rock-solid.

However, this method comes with a small drawback. To ensure the integrity of the downloaded files, they are signed with an OpenGPG key. First, the files are downloaded into a quarantine directory. Afterwards, portage is trying to validate the signatures and only if the signatures match the local portage tree will be overwritten with the newly synced files. The problem with this method is that the signature check is pretty slow, especially on lower-end systems. In my experience, it can take up to several minutes until the update is completed.

Fortunately, we can tell portage to use git instead of rsync for updating the portage tree.

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