Big site on my server

September 28, 2008

Now my über-powerful </sarcasm> Compaq machine is running Debian, a proper server distro of Linux. It’s very efficient and much easier to use as a server than Ubuntu, especially when combined with my new-found favourite server software, XAMPP, which sorts out all the apache / SQL / PHP headache for me, without even the need to install: the simple ‘tar xvfz’ command and the 5 minutes of reading a magazine as it ran was all it took, and was far less hassle than the hours of waiting for apache to compile and install and the head-bashing as mod_ssl refused *yet again* to work alongside apache.

Now that my Compaq has all the functionality of a proper server, I’m venturing into scripting and application territory and have taken the plunge to install WordPress. The site I’ll be hosting (temporarily at least) is my friends’ one: The Beautiful Game. The URL of my wordpress installation is: http://gedanken.we.bs/wordpress/.

The blog (originally here) gets several hundred hits per day and has over 30 writers. It is jointly managed by four of my peers, and in essence, is pretty big. The reason for my hosting it is to provide better functionality from an admin point of view, and also the possibility of displaying Google ads as a source of revenue.

The site isn’t yet finished as yet – there’s lots of work to be done on design, and the import was a bit dodgy. But once everything is fixed, this little lump of whirring metal sitting next to me will be spitting HTML into the Interweb like a real server. Watch this space…


Old computer becomes Apache server

August 15, 2008

ifastnet has been a fairly poor host. They ‘upgraded’ my server without telling me which for some reason took over 14 hours, and my site is frequently down for no apparent reason and with no warning. I guess with them you really get what you pay for: in my case, nothing; I’m using their free hosting service. So I decided to set up an old Compaq computer to run as a server.

It was originally running Mandriva Linux which was hardly ideal since I was for some reason not able to run apt-get… So I installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server on it and apt-get installed Apache. It’s now mirroring my site at http://82.44.63.76:100/ and running a tor relay at the same time. A bad idea on a 4Mb connection perhaps, I’ll just have to wait and see…

View full story and pics here