I host a few wordpress web logs for my friends on my server to give it move or a point than only having my two sites on it. Keaton is one of them and he’s starting to personalize his wordpress web blog by adding a theme he found to it. I have this theme on that I am going to make small changes to here and there. The main thing I’m thinking about is the login button, I just can’t find it. Well I’m going to change some settings on my wordpress to see how things work so I can help Keaton.
Making it home
This wordpress system has been online for just over a week now and I am starting to make it home. I’m sorting out pages and the content to go in them one by one. I’ll just keep reworking the text until I’m happy with it. Instead of having a just a site for news letting you know how the server is going and about down time, that since the Cron stuff the server has been online nearly all the time. The pages are about hosting as that is one of my goals yet to be achieved and my portfolio. The other goals where central file sortage and printing hub that I have manged to achieve this week. I have changed the look of the site to the K2 theme with it’s clean ans shape lines similar to my own personal site. One way you can tell if I am making a system for the masses more “homely” is when I go and edit the code. It’s a small change and I think many wouldn’t notice the difference but I have added a favicon to the site. This is the little “JB” in a blue square next to the URL or title if you are using tabs. I may make more changes to the server as I go along or find modifications that I like, we shell see.
Print server
When I installed debain, a print server was one of the options I selected along with the other stuff like file and web (which I ended up installing some parts manually). After following some guides and mucking around with my laptop, desktop and server I have managed to get the print server working with my HP Photosmart P1000 with my desktop and laptop. Panther on the otherhand didn’t want to play ball so it’s not using the print server but because it’s so close to the printer I could just get a USB cable for it. Tomorrow when I return from school I will set up the other two XP machines to be able to print to it. I might even sort out my laptop so I can print from out and about but I doupt I will.
Samba
After a lot of twiddling with the Samba configuration file I gave up and rewrote the whole thing from scratch so everything that was in that file I knew what it did. The file is now a lot smaller than the orginal but more importantly it works and allows me to access the server from over the network. Due to a difference in Finder between OSX Panther and Tiger I had to install the lastest verison of Samba onto the server which went very well and was much easier than I thought it would be. All that is really left for me to do is sort out ProFTPd and then I will start offering space.
Dynamic DNS
I have been mucking around with a program on the server that runs other programs or scripts at a set time. Every one min past the hour a script updates the IP address for the dynamic DNS records. Simply it means that the server will be online a lot more than waiting for me to come home from school to fix it. So now if the server comes down it would come online within 10 mins. The main causes of server down time are, powercuts, ISP disconnections or me doing something with ther sevrer.
SSL
I have just got HTTPS to work. I’m not to sure what I did but it’s working. I un # some stuff in the Virtual Host SSL file and now it’s all working fine. So now I will set up the SSL FTP so you can use FTP safer than normally. The FTP address is https://ftp.black-flag.co.uk that you can use to access any FTP server and my own when I fix that.
Connectivity
The server is running debain and the web server programs and MySQL are running fine. The problem I am having is that I can not connect to the server apart from using SSH so I can’t update my website or let over people join my server. I have installed ProFTPD for the FTP server that is working but what I do need to sort out is vertural users. These are FTP only users that aren’t on the main system but at the moment I have access to my home directory and that is it. Once it is sorted I will be abled to connect to my server and upload sites and allow my hostees to upload stuff too.
Something else I am having troubles with is Samba. This is the program that allows other computers to connect to it over a network to access files or folders. At the moment I have fixed it so Finder on my laptop doesn’t crash when I try to connect to the server. To do this I had to install the latest version of Samba myself instead of using apt-get. Once I have gotten Samba to work I will update my site and when FTP is working and tested I will start to offer it to my hostees
I will keep you updated with developments. This is why I have made the WordPress blog that I was testing out the homepage for Black-Flag.co.uk instead of the PHP information page.
New system
I have been having lots of problem with my server. It would crash or not connect to the network or something would go wrong making me have to go and fix it so yesterday it took it’s last straw. I replaced the OS with Debian Linux. This OS is much more stable because it does not have a desktop install, meaning that everything you do is command line making it a proper server. To add to this I took away it’s graphics and sound card leaving just the network card installed. I have come across teething troubles that is more than likely to have been caused by me mucking something up while trying to get something else to work. As a result of this I have had to make the changes by hand instead of letting the installer sort things out for me. The server is almost like it was before in the terms that the homepage and 3 of the sites hosted on it are working. All I have left to do is sort out the SSL (https) and the FTP vertural hosts. A new problem I found was that we had a powercut this morning which changed the IP address for all the computers on the network but this was easy to fix cos all I had to do was change the computer the network forwarded stuff to.
Systems up.
I have put my web server online so you don’t have to use a subdomain to get there. I am testing out the word press system as I may be intrested in incoperating it into my current website. This would make it easy to edit and post. I wouldn’t have to be on my network to blog since I would be able to do it over the internet but I am like graham and some of my other friends in the fact that I like to build the system myself instead of relaying on someone else because I feel like I need to prove to myself that I can do it. My web browser supports bloging systems like word press. I don’t know if I will copy this into my normaly blog or end up with two running together or as seperate identitys.