• Using Suexec (or some variant thereof)
• Using the ITK or peruser MPM

However, using suexec isn’t feasible for me – my virtual hosts are dotted all over the file system, not served from /var/www as Suexec demands, and I don’t want to start moving my customers files around in case they have hard coded file system paths, and I don’t want to roll my own Apache – I want to stick with the official Fedora RPMs. There’s a third method too – suPHP, which runs a script as the user which owns it, but this also seems a bad idea imo (just like PHP’s “Safe Mode”).

I’ve also been investigating the feasibility of moving to Lighttpd (but decided against it), and stumbled across a tutorial on how to accomplish this with Lighttpd and FastCGI and thought I could take the same tack with Apache. So, I implemented the first part of the tutorial (using spawn-fcgi to start up the PHP FastCGI clients), but it was configuring Apache to use it that flummoxed me. First off, you can not use external FastCGI servers with Apache’s built-in mod_fcgid, you have to use the mod_fastcgi module, so I compiled, configured and installed that. Then I played around with the Apache config to get it to do what I want to do, and the following in my www.pling.org.uk VirtualHost seems to accomplish the job:

FastCGIExternalServer /srv/pling.org.uk/fcgi-bin -socket /var/lib/fastcgi/chris.sock
ScriptAlias /fcgi-bin /srv/pling.org.uk/fcgi-bin
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /fcgi-bin virtual

The first path in FastCGIExternalServer is a “virtual” path, and anything that gets mapped to there gets sent to the PHP FastCGI server. The ScriptAlias simply maps that virtual directory to be inside of the root (for some reason putting the virtual directory directly in my document root confused my .htaccess rules sending it into an infinite rewrite loop). The final 2 lines simply tell Apache to deal with .php files as “php5-fastcgi” and to map this “php5-fastcgi” type to our fcgi-bin script alias, so all .php files get sent to FastCGI.

Not a bad start to 2010.

You can read my piece, along with the other student journalists, on the MediaGuardian website.

For those not on council, or attending the meeting, I thought I’d lay out my reasoning for introducing the motion in the first place.

The driving reason behind me introducing the motion was that it strikes me as odd that the Union would only provide such a service for half of their student body – men (particularly those travelling alone) are also at risk of assault, although assaults on women are disproportionately of the sexual nature as opposed to men, which I hoped my proposal of giving women priority aimed to account for.

There were a number of arguments against – a compelling one is that the minibus is currently perceived as a women only safe-zone, that the introduction of men to this space would eliminate this and put some of the most vulnerable women off using the minibus, however I still believed that this will be minimal, and outweighed by the significant increase in welfare to vulnerable men who choose the use the service (and who currently have no equivalent service).

Another argument related to the viability of the idea – anecdotal evidence was presented that men would somehow result in the minibus need cleaning more, or are more likely to vomit than women. To me, this argument was less compelling – and is exactly the kind of negative stereotype the Union should be battling against, rather than reinforcing.

Union democracy worked and it was decided that the status quo should be maintained, and although this motion itself has failed, it has brought attention to the issue of a disparity between male and female welfare provision travelling home from the Union at night – hopefully constructive discussions and ideas will arise from this.

As student, we’re a progressive bunch, and obviously a way to do this is to question the status quo, and I have absolutely no regrets about bringing this issue up.

As always, if you want to contact me and discuss with me my role as Union councillor, or you want me to bring something up to council, drop me a line to my Union e-mail address: computersciencecouncillor@sheffield.ac.uk.

We also tackled a number of issues regarding trans representation – updating the definition of women to include self-defining women (there are no reference to men in the constitution, so no corresponding definition for men have been added), to formally include transphobia in the ethical policy and a change to election regulations so students can use preferred names (subject to officer scrutiny to avoid people taking advantage), which also benefits international students who use adopt a western name, etc.

Another issue we discussed was that of splitting the modern languages councillor into 2, which we will be recommending council reject (the rationale behind the split seems fairly weak, and last year’s proposal to introduce more councillors for larger departments failed, and modern languages isn’t a particular large school anyway.

The final issue brought up was for reducing the majority required for constitutional reform from 2/3rds to simple majority which we are also recommending to reject for a number of reasons – it’s out of line with standard student union practice, and an event where over one third of the student body reject a constitutional change, it would be hard to claim that the union is representative of the entire student body considering such a high level of controversy with such a fundamental document.

Thursday sees the next Council meeting, which I have submitted a number of proposals – one asked of me by people I’m living with regarding summer accomodation in Endcliffe for postgraduates, and one I’ve raised regarding opening up the women’s minibus to be a safety minibus for all students (priority being given to women students) to better utilise the resources available, which looks like it might be a controversial debate.

As usual, I’ll blog after that meeting to let you all know the outcome, and as always, you can contact me at computersciencecouncillor@sheffield.ac.uk to let me know your (dis)satisfaction with how I’m representing you.

There were a number of procedural things regarding guillotining the length of meetings, which I was opposed to but passed (fortunately with the caveat with the possibility to vote to extend meetings in the meeting, but I am concerned about the process getting dogged with bureaucracy and procedural motions) as well as for a speech from the PVC for External Affairs to be given next meeting about International Strategy.

We also discussed a constitutional change to change the membership criteria for Women’s Committee from women to self-defining women (in line with the active “This Union is Gay and Trans Friendly” policy). I also mandated Constitutional Committee (i.e., myself) to review the constitution to make sure any other references to women (e.g., Women’s Officer, etc) are updated. Trans issues are one in particular I care about as it is often an under-represented area as a friend from my undergraduate degree made me aware of.

Another issue discussed was that of Officer Blogs, so you should shortly see this blog being replicated on the Union website

The main issue that I felt very strongly about in the meeting was that of the Union Policy. Every 3 years, Union Policy has to be renewed, and come March 2010, 4 policies had to be renewed. At Sheffield, Union Council can renew policy without consultation, however I deem this to be almost undemocratic, and that after 3 years, especially for controversial issues, an almost entirely new Union should have their say on it. However, SEC (Student Executive Committee – aka, the sabbatical officers) make recommendations on which action it believes Council should take and it recommended that the following 3 policies should just be renewed for 3 years by council, without referring it to the student body and without modification:

• End Israeli Occupation
• Companies Involved in Animal Testing
• University Relations with Arms Companies

And for a further policy: Safe Affordable Housing to be modified (and therefore require ratification by referendum in March). The full text of the policies are on the Union website.

Obviously these are controversial policies (my own personal views on them aside – that I don’t believe the Union should get involved in international politics) and I strongly believed that it was only appropriate for Council to send them for referenda to let a new student body have its say on them. The fact that Council voted with over a 2/3rds majority to renew them for 3 years without wider consultation shocked me and I believe for the whole decision to be undemocratic, imo we’re on council to represent the students, and not make controversial decisions for them, especially when there’s a mechanism in place . Sheffield doesn’t have much in the way of policy (compare YUSU’s list of active policy for a Union that has policy, and a direct student voice for pretty much everything).

Other than this, the remaining of Council was fairly routine, although a number of issues were brought up with regards to the Union’s alcohol retail policy and also the relationship with external promotional companies (including Carnage) and Alex Swatton is putting together a motion to be tabled at the next meeting for this.

After the meeting I talked about the Women’s Minibus with Amy Sutherland (the Women’s Officer) with a view to tabling a motion to open up the minibus for all students (with priority being given to female students) as there is apparently often spare capacity – and it seems a waste not to use it.

As always, get in touch if you want to talk to me about my role as councillor.

We spent most of the meeting discussing the objectives for Union and the sabbatical officers over the next year, which did turn into an extended “officers questions” session.

The few key points I think were raised here was feedback about the council elections – particularly that there was a lack of an e-mail sent out afterwards informing people who won the elections – and with the women’s health issues objective of the Women’s Officer. Parts of this include sexual health matters, and as Alex Swatton put it in the discussion “it takes two to tango”, so I was glad to clarify that the things the Women’s Officer was doing with regards to sexual health (particularly the DIY chlamydia tests) were open to both men and women (and everyone in between).

Many of the other points raised were clarifications, e.g., in the case of the Activities Officer’s “Show off the great things students do” objective to check it included external media as well as internal. A great number of concerns arose with regards to ACS (Accommodation & Campus Services) policy with student housing, as well as the pressure of private landlords trying to get students to sort out their houses early (an issue I was very aware of and contributed to at York). I also wanted to raise a few points with the Finance Officer, but he unfortunately couldn’t attend so that was delayed to the following week.

The Maths and Statistics councillor also raised an issue about teaching space, and I contributed with my experience from COM6451 rooms being overcrowded. The Education Officer will be following up this issue with the department and feeding back next council meeting (in roughly 2 weeks).

As I’m a postgraduate student, I also contributed to a discussion about postgraduate involvement in the Union, giving my two cents. The PGT (Postgraduate Taught) councillor and the Education Officer were following that one up with some ideas to come to the next meeting with.

We also dealt with a number of procedural items, including how best to scrutinise the officer performance (it was decided that reports submitted to the council was the best solution) and ratification of the Union Officers job contract (which was deferred following consultation of HR to ensure that employment law wasn’t broken).

As the meeting over ran greatly (by about an hour), a number of items were moved from the agenda to the following meeting (such as review of committee minutes), leaving the only other thing dealt with a number of elections to various committees, such as the USport board and the Constitutional Committee (which I was elected onto) as well as the election of Chair and Vice-chair of council.

So, phew! That was it – for 2 weeks at least. As always – get in touch with me if you want me to raise an issue at Council, or you’re disappointed with me.

Councillor training was today – a 4 hour session incorporating a mock session at the end which I unfortunately had to leave early due to other commitments.

The main thing that struck me about the session is just how complicated and in depth the Union is (they’ve franchised some of their brands out), especially compared to what I’ve had experience with before at York and Alcuin. Obviously Sheffield is a much bigger University, and a much bigger Union – over 900 members of staff and an 8 figure turnover which gives rise to the complex structures that appear to have arisen. The other main shock is the level of support given to the sabbatical officers – their salary is considerably more than their counterparts at York (although I would agree with the point raised that it’s still not representative of an equivalent job in industry!) and they appear to have considerably more staff to support them than at York – unlike last year when there was no General Manager for a good part of the year, Sheffield has a GM, a Deputy GM, and lord knows how many other full time staff to support them.

The other main difference is representation. Unlike at York where essentially everything is done by cross-campus ballot, there seems to be a great deal of appointment into positions – apparently until recently even the Council was appointed! However, there do appear to be more representative structures in place – Union Links in particular who are students who (from what I can gather) are paid to ensure that any University education (for York people reading this, education is synonymous with academic, e.g., York’s Academic Officer Charlie Leyland vs. Sheffield’s Education Officer Holly Taylor) campaigns are being carried out within the individual departments.

Another interesting thing I noted was a seeming lack of Union policy – at York last year we got 8 motions passed in a single UGM, whereas Sheffield currently only has 8 pieces of active policy overall! Presumably this is because policy is not directly synonymous to UGM motions but there are other ways of getting things done.

There was lots of other information as well – it was a genuinely useful session not just about procedure and format of council but also about the different structures and lots of corporate bumpf about the Union.

The first council meeting is on Thursday – the initial agenda includes the approval of individual objectives and aims for the sabbatical officers, and also a larger vision for the Union, discussion of how best to scrutinise officers and their code of conduct and election of councillors to sit on the Constitutional Select Committee, the USport Board and for election of the Chair and Vice Chair of Council, as well as any issues other councillors want to raise – I’m not planning on raising any myself at the first meeting

If you have any questions about any of these or have an issue you want me to raise – leave me a comment, or drop me an e-mail at computersciencecouncillor[at]shef.ac.uk

I’ll post another update after Thursday with my experiences from the meeting.

Hi there,

I’m Chris Northwood and I’m running for the position of Computer Science Councillor on the University of Sheffield Union of Students Council.

One of my pledges if I get elected is to write blog posts keeping people updated as to what I’m doing as Union Councillor, so I’ll be using this blog for that. But for now, I’m just going to let people know how my campaign’s going!

I’ve just launched my Facebook group and dropped my poster designs off at the Union Copyshop to get them printed for the campaign proper next week. So, hopefully over the next week you’ll see me with my leaflets, or my posters on the wall around the Uni. Feel free to stop me and ask me anything about my campaign, or drop a comment on this blog, tweet me or use my Facebook group, and hopefully I’ll be representing you all come next Thursday.

Just remember to vote for me. I promise I’ll do a good job.

However, this didn’t work; none of the changes in my new private project were picked up by Buildbot. It’s fairly obvious why – Buildbot was configured to access the site anonymously, so could not access the new private project. A quick read of the Buildbot manual later revealed that there was the option to add authentication to Buildbot (using the svnuser option in the poller, but the username option in the checkout phase…), yet even after adding these, the polling was failing.

Curious, I ran the command line (svn log –username …) and noticed that once again, it wasn’t showing the relevant information. Curious, I checked Apache’s logs and lo-and-behold, no authentication was being sent. Then it struck me, the root of my repository is public, no 401 error is returned, so SVN probably doesn’t send the credentials – running svn log directly on the project worked, and with no option to force credentials being sent against the more generic root, a clever solution was required.

So, Buildbot has to poll the SVN project directly, but I still want Buildbot to monitor all changes on my repository (for the other projects I want unit tests running on). And this leads to the following little hack:

from buildbot.changes.svnpoller import SVNPoller
c['change_source'] = [SVNPoller(svnurl="http://www.pling.org.uk/svn/",
                                pollinterval=20,
                                split_file=split_file_branches),
                      SVNPoller(svnurl="http://www.pling.org.uk/svn/mofunzone/trunk/",
                                pollinterval=20,
                                svnuser='buildbot', svnpasswd='********',
                                split_file=lambda path:('mofunzone/trunk', path))]

Nasty, but it works.

This also means I’ve finally abandoned my LiveJournal account. I reread my posts last night and most of them were the cringe-worthy whinging of a 14/15 year old so I’ve imported the posts to WordPress, completely cleared out my account, and made them private so I only I can read them.

I’ve done a little bit of .htaccess hacking to allow for some interesting tricks with WordPress, such as integrating old content with the new site (I’m unlikely to port my CS notes into WordPress) as well as the external apps (Fisheye, Buildbot, Figleaf, etc), so the entire site doesn’t meet the overall design or WordPress, but it does more or less work.

One final thing I should mention. I made a video for my parents’ farmhouse, which isn’t amazing, but I’m quite proud of