Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

I had some time last week to get to the root of a recent installation problem. On my work system running Server 2003, the installation package for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 would fail repeatedly. This was the case using either the Microsoft Update or standalone MSI download. Since service packs for Visual Studio are generally a Good Idea, this was a seriously annoying inconvenience - not the least of which was seeing the “one remaining update” icon in the system tray.

In any event, I managed to pick the correct answer out of the Web from Egghead Cafe, which pointed to KB925336 from Microsoft’s site. There are packages for Server 2003 in 32-bit, x64 and Itanium versions. Since I know a number of developers run the server OS (through MSDN usually), this seems to be a worthwhile fix.

Note that the package does require a reboot before Service Pack 1 will install properly.

If you own one or more of the 350K domains hosted with Dreamhost, you may be interested in using their statistics tracking system. However, if you have WordPress installed at the root of your domain, the /stats/ URL is inaccessible and only results in a 404 error, as WordPress tries to parse /stats/ as a permalink to a post or page. This is due to the .htaccess directives that WordPress employs.

The solution is on the DreamHost wiki and can be added to the top of your .htaccess file fairly quickly:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(stats|failed_auth\.html)/?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
</IfModule>

This code comes before the WordPress commented line:
# BEGIN WordPress

Alternatively, if you’re concerned about people possibly bruteforcing your statistics username and password (since it uses simple HTTP authentication), you can deny public access to /stats/ and access the logfiles from an SSH session. Keep in mind that this will be a text-based view of your statistics.


ssh user@yourdomain.com
cd logs/yourdomain.com/http/html
links index.html

The logs directory is accessible under your home directory (~). You could also always run a tar/gzip command on the ~/logs/yourdomain.com/http/html directory and SFTP/FTP the file, then view the stats locally.

For more information, such as performing the same operation with Ruby on Rails apps or TextPattern, check the wiki.