Archive for the 'scummbox.org' Category

So thanks to a friend’s awesomeness, I have access to a proper Linux VM kicking it in a real datacenter! This means I can finally move the content off of my home server!

So Bung (the VM) will now serve my static content for the various sites I host, and Pants (local server) will be for services. This should simplify a lot of things, and give me a bit more experience with a) Ubuntu as a server and b) running a VM server.

In addition to switching up hosts, I’m also switching up HTTPD services. I’ve dealt exclusively with Apache (1.3 and 2) in the past. The same friend that is providing the VM also convinced me to give Nginx (wiki.nginx.org) a shot. It’s taken quite a bit of getting used to, but it does seem to be crazy fast, and the config gets a lot easier as you go along.

I have already migrated the sites under the scummbox.org umbrella, and am just rsync-ing the content for the other domains that I host. Hopefully the remainder of the sites will be relocated by this weekend!

As hinted in the last post, Scummbox.org is running some new services.

To facilitate remote access to my network, OpenVPN has been installed. It was a cinch to install, and through some trial and error I have gotten additional routes passed through to access my home network range from any remote location.

Also installed was TinyProxy. This allows users connected to the VPN to (transparently!) access sites that may be blocked at their location.

A final new service running is GnuMP3d… A remote playlist/streaming client that is tucked behind the VPN to prevent rampant and unauthorized

This entry is being written on the brand new pre-prod scummbox! Weird to write a blog post that could not see the light of day for potential months!

As of yesterday, I decided that pants, the existing scummbox, is getting long in the tooth. It’s an old Celeron 333 maching that I got for free from a company that was throwing a tonne of them out. It lived a hard life before I got it, and it’s lived a harder life since then.

Pants has had cats chew on its power cables, rained on, dropped, had catastrophic power failures and still runs tickity-boo 99% of the time. But that 1% is out there, and I don’t want to get burned.

So I’ve made New Pants! New Pants is running much newer hardware (AMD X2 processor, 2gb of ram) and with a lot more storage (1TiB vs 40GiB) in a well-ventilated case. There has also been a complete OS changeover from the old FreeBSD 5.4 to a current version of Gentoo Linux.

As I type, I’m configuring mail services and copying over some test sites to see how things deal with my Apache/PHP/MySQL installs. WordPress has dealt well with the change, and theoretically mail delivery and webmail are running, too!

The problem will be identifying all the different processes running on Pants, and replicating them on the new machine. Already Apache 2 has changed how I store sites and configure virtual servers… but I’m not expecting it all to be smooth sailing.

Well, another post that no one will see once this build is closer to finished!

Poor oft-neglected blog. A fairly quick update on the state of the nerd:

My various and sundry linux machines are running well: No major changes to Scummbox recently, and the desktop machine is running well (with an AMD X2 processor upgrade.)

I’ve all but

So since I last posted in this blog, the guild sites that I hosted have pretty much died and some minor software updates have occured. Webmin is now running at the current version, and I’ve upgraded most of the WordPress installs to the current version as well.

I think the time has come to start looking at getting MPD and Icecast2 back up and running on this machine, for music library broadcasting.

I think, hardware-wise, I’d like to get Scummbox running with several bigger and newer hard drives for data storage and such. Perhaps even RAID them.

So, until the next major software revision (or next time Scummbox pukes for no reason), farewell!

So as of late this week, my /var directory was topping out. Turns out the space I allocated “generously” was being gobbled up by the databases I host. D’oh! Luckily, I happened to have the old /usr partition sill available (4 gig, as opposed to the 200-some-odd meg I had for /var.) So after about 2 seconds of googling, I found this article which basically did all the work for me

So now all the sites *should* be up and running. The one downside to the move is that, for some reason, the users didn’t move over. Everything *should* be re-added now.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the giant pulsating brain behind PHP, has posted a very interesting article about a “No-framework PHP MVC framework” which, frankly, breaks my brains.

I’ve posted this here for my own purposes, but it looks like a great way to work validation and AJAX into DB accessing.

On Sunday (February 5th) I moved the /usr dir to a 40 gig drive. This gives web pages and user directories 26 gigs of free space as opposed to the 300 some-odd megs of space it had pre-upgrade.

The upgrade itself was painless… just ran the sysconfig to format, partition and label the new drive, mount it temporarily, copy the data over from /usr (with a myriad of switches), change the fstab file, reboot and voila! /usr is mounted on a 40 gig drive!

Many thanks to Lojack for pointing me in the right direction!

I’ve upgraded my long-negelected blog to WordPress 2.0!

It’s actually quite a nice upgrade. I thought it would be a nothing-fixed-but-we-incremented-the-number sort of deal. The entire back-end of the app has been redone. And it didn’t break my theme!

All in all, I’m happy with it!

The domain name guildsite.ca has been registered and is now where the two(!!) World Of Warcraft guilds I belong to are hosted. (Alliance: Explorer’s League | Horde: OMG IRL)

This is on top of the sites I currently host (for example, olmsted.ca, and of course scummbox.org) This is a pretty busy little server all of a sudden!