Giant Robot

I've been using libapache2-mod-auth-mysql for a CiviCRM site which requires authentication from a Drupal DB, and
it worked well generally but gave intermittent MySQL disconnections. These were making the authentication fail with an error 500, which was ... ugly ...

It took lots of digging, but eventually I found a simple patch that seems to fix the problem. It simply tells MySQL to reconnect when the link fails, which was (before MySQL 5.0) the default but isn't any more.

I have installed a few Debian Sarge (and 4.0) systems in the last week while building a web app for a customer, and they all came up with some (IMO) bad permissions in /dev/. In particular /dev/urandom, /dev/random, /dev/null and /dev/tty were being vexatious by persisting in being unwriteable for common users. This meant I got a few funky errors when trying to SSH as a Regular Guy, or use SSH, or do other 'normal' type things.