return void;

Okay, so I haven’t been posting for several days but I have a good reason. More specifically, I am working on reorganizing my hoem network. With all of our recent reorganization around the house, I decided now is the best time to do something about the cluttered desk.

A fileserver’s main task is to serve the files located on its local harddisks. This is the essential task of a webserver, but far more focused. I decided that erebus, my samba server, should undertake the responsibility of serving webpages. To move my site entirely over to the fileserver, there were many requirements to getting everything working correctly again.

First, I decided to have erebus host a mysql database for the entire network. After boxing with the USE flags, I eventually installed all of the necessary packages. Then I was on to installing lighttpd. This was a problem last time because the FastCGI plugin support for PHP can be fairly tricky. There was a HOWTO on the gentoo forums that worked well, but still did not bring up how to avoid the baggage that comes along with PHP. The most annoying of them all is gentoo’s reliance on Apache. By default, Apache is chosen as the webserver when one is missing. To make matters worse, gentoo still tries to force Apache to be installed even though lighttpd is installed. To get PHP support, you really only need php-cgi and to fix your php binary in the lighttpd.conf.

PHP support, mysql database, and lighttpd webserver were all installed and everything seemed ready to go. I wanted to install the latest WordPress version 2.0. The problem is the ebuild in gentoo is poorly managed and still remains to be updated. I am tired of waiting for an ebuild to install a php website so I decided to just install it manually myself.

This wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The main problem was the data was on another server for an old version of WordPress. I followed their guide to backing up the data and ended up with a good snapshot; the steps are reproducable. However, since the webserver was on a new machine, the site wouldn’t load correctly but would transfer to the original site. I switched the IP address of the webserver on hanger (the router) and things started working correctly. Just make sure that if you follow this same sort of procedure, that you run the upgrade script. Without it, you will encounter troubles with the categories and links, this changed in the backend on the new 2.0 version of WordPress.

I still have a few changes which I need to get the machine fully working for the webserver, but everything should be up and running tomorrow. Those of you who have accounts will notice the new administrative panel; it has many new features and heavily utilizes Ajax for a slick, responsive interface. I will make an official post once the transition is complete; expect troubles accessing the system between the hours of 5-10pm until then.

This will make babel (dvd burner and current webserver) somewhat obsolete. We should be able to cram the machine into the closet until a burn is needed. I am actually thinking of rebuilding it to be a mini-itx machine that strictly burns discs. Unfortunately, this transition means that I will have to start doing more regular backups on the fileserver, so I will be looking for a program to assist in this chore.

I am also looking to replace the application I currently use to serve my music. I have been looking around and I believe Zina will fit my needs. Hopefully, I can turn this into a WordPress plugin!

Anyways, time to prepare for a long day at work. I have several posts coming down the pipe about this weekend. There were several major events and they needed to be blogged. I will have them finished by tomorrow and then I will continue my work on the server transition. Stay tuned.