HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.4 kernel

This article was first written in July 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/142).

To use Bonding Ethernet for High-Availability (fail-over) on Debian (Woody, Sarge or Sid with a 2.4.x kernel) you need to:

• install package ifenslave-2.4
• make sure the real NICs kernel modules are loaded automatically
• edit /etc/network/interfaces to look like this:

iface bond0 inet static address 10.31.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 10.31.1.0 gateway 10.31.1.254 up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0 up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth1

• comment the lines referring to your real NICs in the same file
• add the following lines to your /etc/modutils/arch/i386:

alias bond0 bonding options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200

• launch update-modules

For 2.6 kernels, you might want to take a look at HOWTO Setup Bonding Ethernet on Debian with a 2.6 kernel

HTML character encoding

This article was first written in July 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/139).

To enable all characters to be displayed correctly in an HTML page, even if you use different languages (english, japanese, russian, …), a good way is to encode everything in unicode, using the UTF-8 character set representation.

Server & client config

In Apache config file httpd.conf, one of the following must be defined:
#AddDefaultCharset on
AddDefaultCharset off
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
More info: Apache AddDefaultCharset directive

In your HTML page, define:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Working with unicode databases

To display the content of a unicode database, no need to decode the data.
For example in PHP, no need to use utf8_decode().

If you use forms to update a unicode database, there is no need to encode the POST data.
For example in PHP, no need to utf8_encode($_POST['var']).

Working with non-unicode databases

To display the content of a non-unicode database, you need to decode the data before displaying them.
For example in PHP, you must use utf8_decode().

If you use forms to update a non-unicode database, you need to encode the POST data prior to send them to the database.
For example in PHP, you must use utf8_encode($_POST['var']).

Remark

The best solution to not have to worry about encoding/decoding is to use the same character encoding on the client (HTML page) as on the server (database).

Links

W3C: Q&A: Checking HTTP Headers

UTF-8 explained