Just wanted to make a quick post that if you’re interested in Ruby on Rails Development, please contact me over at Velocity Labs instead of here. Thanks!

I find it’s pretty annoying when you have to go log file spelunking only to find all the timestamps are in UTC.  But we can set the timezone of the server so when Rails, cron, scripts, etc run, they output more readable dates.

You can check your current timezone by just running

Or checking the timezone file at

So to change it just run

And follow on screen instructions.  Easy.

Also be sure to restart cron as it won’t pick up the timezone change and will still be running on UTC.

UPDATE July 2016
In the comments Dan mentions that in 16.04 you use something like:

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Having problems getting ssh to use your public key?

Log on to your server as root using a password. Remember not to log out as root until you have ssh working with your public key or you may inadvertently lock yourself off the box.. which sucks Double check your sshd_config, I use the following options (note you will have to restart ssh for these changes to take effect):

Make sure your public key is in the .ssh/authorized_keys file for the user you plan on logging onto the server as. You can use this super helpful authme bash function.

So let’s say you’ve done all this and YOU STILL CAN’T get it to work. It’s probably because you have incorrect permissions set on the .ssh directory and/or the authorized_keys file. You can check this by looking at the ssh auth log. Depending on your server OS it’s usually either /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/secure . Tail this file and see if you’re getting this message

Obviously your directory will be different depending on the name of the user you’re trying to ssh on as. But this message is the give away that your permissions are wrong. Change them with the following, assuming your username is “deploy”, otherwise just substitute that part.

Try ssh’ing on again in another terminal window and you should be good. Now it would be safe to log off as root.

In one of my current project, whenever I ran a rake task that did a net/http request it was causing segmentation faults.

And it seems whenever I get a segmentation fault the first place I need to look is at OpenSSL. I’ve had similar problems with seg faults and openssl in the past, namely this OpenSSL Bus Error that I was getting on Ruby 1.8.7.

If you read that post you’ll see this happened because I use MacPorts and have OpenSSL installed through it, in addition to a local OS X version. To get Ruby to be happy, you have to point your Ruby install to the correct version at installation time. So remove the bad install

And reinstall

Which I forgot to do with my Ruby 1.9.2 install after upgrading OS X versions. That last bit about iconv isn’t directly related, but I have inconv package installed to RVM, you can read about that here RVM Iconv.

Also, this Phusion blog post REE 1-8-7-2011-03-released mentions problems with OpenSSL and MacPorts. Moral of the story… use HomeBrew? Dunno, but I’ll probably start using it when I upgrade my laptop.

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I just ran into a rather hard to track down issue with Authlogic and Rails 3. After upgrading an old app to Rails 3, in production, the sessions wouldn’t persist, but everything worked fine in development mode. After much searching it turns out that there’s an issue with using Rails 3, Authlogic, and HTTP auth together. I had put up HTTP basic auth in Nginx to prevent the site from getting seen by random people or web crawlers. When the app was a Rails 2 app, there was no issue, in fact the Rails app shouldn’t even have known about the HTTP auth since I was doing it in Nginx, not Rails. Not sure why this is a problem with this Rails/Authlogic/HTTP combination, but anyways, the fix was to add this one-liner to your UserSession model

    1 class UserSession < Authlogic::Session::Base
    2   allow_http_basic_auth false
    3 end