Time for a break form the geek stuff. Please take a few moments to click over to Sun Comprehending Glass. It's my wife's blog and she is much better that me about providing updates. Plus she talks about food every Tuesday. Yummy!
Geek Warning: This is another geeky post. If that isn’t your thing, please feel free to move on to a different entry or come back soon. I promise to have a baby picture up soon!
When last we left the web server project I had decided on using Apache and Linux to host my website on a computer in my office/lab. With that decision out of the way I set off to find some install disks for Linux.
Ubuntu was my first stop. It’s the distro that I’ve had the most experience with so I figured I would have at least a small head start on understanding what I was doing. I dug out my CDs, opened a beer and set off for my “lab”. And by “lab” I mean a half bath at the far end of my house that my father and I turned into an office. I know it sounds small, and it is; but it’s still bigger than my cube at work. Ask my wife. She has seen both and can tell you it’s true.
The hardware for this project once had a life as a Dell GX240, but now only the motherboard, case and the branding on the outside are still OEM. The memory, video card, power supply, sound card, and all the drives (even the floppy) have been replaced. And the way it stands now I am going to have to look in to modding the case to get some better air flow if I really am going to run it as a server. But that is another project.
I booted the beast up and put in the Ubuntu CD. It came up to the splash screen and I stepped through the pages selecting the various options I wanted for this build. When I was ready I clicked on the install button and waited. And waited. And waited. The process had hung at the point where it was about to reformat and partition the drives. Grrrrr. Oh well, this was supposed to be a learning process. If it all went smoothly what was I going to learn, right?
Thinking it was a fluke, I simply rebooted, selected my set up options and clicked go. No joy; it hung again in the same spot. This was odd since I had used these CDs before. I knew them to be good. No worries. I was not wed to this distro so I figured I would just try another.
A co-worker suggest I try doing a network install of Fedora Core 3. For those of you unaware of what a network install is it works like this. Rather than download and burn 4 CDs (at about 700MB each) you download and burn a boot CD that is about 10MB in size. Using this CD you boot the PC and run the installer. That program will ask you for a path to find the install files on a network. Since the internet is just a big network you can simply point it at the files on the web that you would have downloaded had you been using the traditional method. This has the advantage of having the installer only download the files you need and none of the ones you don’t. For example, only plan on using the Gnome desktop? Then there is no reason to spend the time getting KDE is there?
So once again I booted up the PC, this time using the Fedora boot disk. I stepped through the pages selecting the options I needed and telling it where to find the files on the internet. Once it had everything it needed to do the install I clicked “Next” and waited. And waited. And waited. Once more the system had hung at the point of formatting the drive.
This was starting to get frustrating. In hindsight I might have been better off swapping out for a different drive but since I was fairly sure that it was good I didn’t. Instead I dug around some older (Core 2) Fedora install disks and gave one more try. Success.
I am not sure why it worked this time, but it did. Anyone out there know what it is about the older core that would format my drive during the install when a newer core would not?
Anyway, the OS is up and running so the next step will be in install Apache, PHP and mySQL.
WARNING: This post will technical and contain very little for the non-geeks out there. Please know you have been warned. For everyone else I will post a new picture of the baby soon.
Today I took a few serious steps toward building my web server.
The first step was to decide what server software I was going to use. While I am sure there are some from the Slashdot crowd who will shout me down for not looking at other alternatives I immediately narrowed the field to a choice between Apache and IIS. I am sure there are other good products out there if I just went over to Sourceforge and looked around. But I look at it this way: I’m reinventing the wheel from my point of view by hosting the site myself. Since that means building the server, loading all of the server side software, debugging the whole thing and providing all the content for the website I saw no reason to add to the confusion by using a bunch of nonstandard unsupported apps. That meant staying with the major tools like Apache or IIS.
In the end I decided on Apache and here is why. Apache is more secure than IIS, can run on Windows, Linux or OSX (if I had the money to go out and buy a Mac big enough to run it on. I don’t think my platoon of Mac Classics all slaved together would have the horsepower necessary(but it might be a fun project to try some time)) and since it runs under the GPL it’s free. And as we all know Free (as in beer) is a very good price.
One other reason for choosing Apache is that I’ve never used it before. I am no expert on IIS but I have used it a bit when I was trying to set up a self-serve Help Desk ticketing system at a previous place of employment. Apache is totally foreign territory and that means a learning experience. (You know, I used to cringe when my father, a teacher or some other elder on my life would tell me something was a learning experience. Now a days I tend to seek them out for myself and my kids. Funny how life works.)
My next decision was what OS to use. I foundered back an forth between XP and Linux but not for long. In the end I figured that if I was going to go in for a learning experience then I might as well go in all the way. That made Linux the obvious choice since all I was going to learn from using Windows was how to click ‘Next”.
With that I am off to find my install disks……
After being gone for a week and a half being repaired by Apple my iPod has come home. It always amazes me how much I miss my iPod when I don't have it by my side. My wife calls it my iCrack; she’s right.
After a long winter break I am happy to announce that Life On A Pacific Island is back!
However, it will only be back in this form for a short amount of time, no more than 6 or 8 weeks I think. Why? I am going to be moving all of this from a blog format to a more flexible news portal style website.
While the blog is good at what it does, it's not great at what is doesn't do. Huh? In short I want to be able to post photo galleries, run polls, have a discussion board and include other fun widgets. To that end I am going to be building a web server and hosting the site myself. As that project unfolds I will continue to post about it here, thus allowing you to get a peek behind the curtain and eventually be among the first to see the new site once it launches.
Be sure to grab the RSS feed from the link on the right side of the page so you can keep up to date on my progress.