Its all about Ruby On Rails
Archive for July, 2007
Careful while using Exception Notifier Plugin
Jul 26th
Exception Notifier Plugin can make you crazy as it made me yesterday.
Let me explain, I was using this plugin for one of my project and our server got a DOS attack. We were requested some URLs that doesn’t exists, like http://somedomain.com/game.rar etc… . I had registered my gmail account to get notification mails. And due to this attack I was sent around 7631*61 mails in 10 hrs. This made me crazy, because I was unable to receive any other email as (may be) my queue was busy with receiving notification mails. Then gmail started bouncing back those mails saying “The Gmail user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered. Please resend your message at a later
time”. And then it became a loop, Gmail-My Server-Gmail.
I found 303552 mails in postfix queue of my server. That were ready to send to gmail. Now my first priority was to clean that postfix queue, so I did it by issuing “sudo postsuper -d ALL”. I hope to receive mails ASAP, It is now more than 48 hrs i received any genuine mail.
So I request you to be careful while using this plugin 
Note: Since my gmail account not receiving mails, so please sent it to akhil at vinsol dot com
Get svn commit notification right into your inbox by using svn hook post-commit
Jul 12th
If you wish you can get notification right into your inbox when a team member commits the code. This mail will contain list of files added/deleted along with the svn diff of files that are modified. This needs some extra efforts to setup, but once it is setup it is very helpful.
This can be done by using svn hooks. Yes, svn has inbuilt hook functionality like pre-commit, post-commit, post-lock, post-unlock, pre-lock, pre-unlock, start-commit. We’ll use post-commit hook to get notifications.
First of all get a perl script from here http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/hook-scripts/commit-email.pl.in and copy it to hooks directory inside your repository directory, lets say /var/www/repos/repository_name/hooks.
Make sure to rename it as commit-email.pl, ofcourse you need perl installed on your server. Now cd to hooks directory inside you repository directory. Rename post-commit.tmpl to post-commit, and chmod 755 to post-commit and commit-email.pl . Now open post-commit in you favorite editor, and put “/usr/bin/perl /var/www/repos/commit-email.pl –from svn-notify@example.com -s ‘SVN commit notification’ ‘$REPOS’ ‘$REV’ user_whom_to_notify@example.com, another_user_to_notify@example.com” at the bottom of that file. Now open commit-email.pl and make changes in configuration section according to your requirement and server, specially svnlook path.
Congrats!, You are done .
Now your server will send email notification to user_whom_to_notify@example.com, another_user_to_notify@example.com whenever someone commits.
**For security reasons, the Subversion repository executes hook scripts with an empty environment that is, no environment variables are set at all, not even $PATH or %PATH%. Because of this, a lot of administrators are baffled when their hook script runs fine by hand,but doesn’t work when run by Subversion. Be sure to explicitly set environment variables in your hook and/or use absolute paths to programs.
It worked for me, Please let me know if it works for you too.
Is SVN really atomic?
Jul 9th
I am just wondering if svn is really atomic. Actually some days ago I freezed rails and tried to commit but due to some network problem the commit process failed. And then I found some of those files under version control, which should not be there if snv is atomic. I tried many times to commit after svn delete those files, but stuck with the same problem. May be I misunderstood some thing about svn. Did somebody also faced same problem?
