I first posted over two months ago about the fact that I’d been digging around in Rails forum software and discovered that beast.caboo.se was loaded with spam. I notified both of them via email, while I recieved a reply from Josh, over 2 months later and still nothing has been done about the spam. Beast has now been replaced by ’Altered Beast’ as the forum to use (since Beast is pre rails 2.0). Never the less the official beast forum still shows up high in the search rankings on google.

Whatever respect I had for Josh Grobel and Rick Olsen aka Technoweenie is now gone. Josh argued that the forum isn’t used anymore. My response to that would be to delete the spam and lock the forums so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I know everyone is on limited time, but it clearly reflects badly on them when sex sites are advertised on their forums and yet they do nothing about it.

Why don’t they care? 15 minutes of one of their time and the problem would be gone.

Prasad on his blog (you can find the link on the right), has a really really useful collection of dql that can be used for various admin tasks. I’m going to slowly build up my own list of DQL for much the same purposes. A note on convention: This is standard convention but as a refresher (or for those not aware of that convention) anything within < > is to be filled in at runtime. Remove the < > brackets and replace with appropriate value.

1. Updates the ACL on all content in a given folder…be aware it won’t allow you to replace the ACL on a locked piece of content, so you’ll either need to skip it like I have below or make sure that all the content is unlocked before trying to do this query, otherwise the error message is VERY VERY vague.
   

   update dm_sysobject object set acl_name = ‘<acl_name>’, set acl_domain = ‘<acl_owner>’ where folder (‘/<folder>’, DESCEND) and r_lock_owner = ”

2. Replaces the ACL on all content in a given folder – this is an important change because it only overwrites a specific ACL rather than changing all the content to be under the new ACL, which could potentially be a security problem if the content has been locked down further. It’s really only a simple change to the previous query.
   

   update dm_sysobject object set acl_name = ‘<new_acl_name>’, set acl_domain = ‘<acl_owner>’ where folder (‘/<folder>’, DESCEND) and r_lock_owner = ” and acl_name = ‘<old_acl_name>’

The following comes in very hand when you’re trying to troubleshoot authentication problems. Go into DA and find the Administrative Methods; there should be one called ‘SET_OPTIONS’  which allows you to put in trace_authentication and set it to true. All authentication attempts will then be logged to the docbase log.

A few notes:

• If you have a clustered setup you’ll need to make sure it gets turned on for both content servers (you can specify which you’re connecting to when you login)
• Make sure you turn it off when you’re done troubleshooting, it adds a performance overhead not to mention chewing up log space.
• Restarting the content server will cause it to turn off…to turn it off without restarting the content server just set it to false in the same place you turned it on.