TheNitai

Nginx is our favorite web server currently as it is fast, lean and easy to configure. Performance is just outstanding and if you haven’t take a look at it.

One thing that I noticed while we deployed Nginx with Tomcat is that their default size for the buffers are very low. Don’t know why a 4K buffer size would be sufficient. If you keep it at their default size and might have a heavy duty Tomcat app then it could be that you will see error messages like:

upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream

The remedy for this error is to set the parameters for higher values for the proxy_buffer* parameters as we have done and now all is back to normal. Here are the current settings that worked well for us;

proxy_buffer_size   128k;
proxy_buffers   4 256k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size   256k;

Recently over at the website of our open source Digital Asset Management company Razuna Ltd., we published a desktop application that was build with Adobe AIR.

Now, while we could easily link to the AIR application, which all end with an extension of “.air”, within the web page it would prompt the user to install the application only under FireFox (both Windows and MacOS X), but users with Safari or Internet Explorer where prompted to download a “.zip” file.

In order to fix this, we had to change the mime type configuration of the web server itself. Now, we figured that there are different solution to this, depending on your web server;

For Apache

Adding the mime type for .air extensions with Apache requires you edit the file “/etc/mime.types” (on RedHat/CentOS) and adding the line:

application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip     .air

Make sure to reboot Apache to apply the changes.

For Tomcat

Adding mime types for your Tomcat installation requires you to edit the file “tomcat/conf/web.xml” and adding a new “mime-mapping” like;

<mime-mapping>
<extension>air</extension>
<mime-type>application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

Make sure to restart Tomcat to apply the change.

Using .htaccess

If you can’t access the server config files or you simply don’t want to, then the other option is to simply add the mime type to your .htaccess file.  Add the following line to it;

AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air

Save it and you should be all set to make it possible to launch the Adobe AIR installer ones your .air file is downloaded.