webmages

Ok, so I got the x-bit modchip working, and have managed to flash several different bioses to it. The next step is to get a dashboard installed that’ll let me do stuff. I got the software downloaded, and was ready to burn a dvd with the disk image, but I put it off for a day. The next morning, I wake up, and lo and behold my primary harddrive has died. And I don’t just mean the partition table is messed up. The motherboard actually wouldn’t POST with the drive attached. Great.

I was going to completely nuke windows after I got this cd burned, since the software’s only distributed in a windows only exe format, and now I had to prep my backup disk and get everything installed again.

So I got that done. Took me about 2 days part time to install, update, secure, connect to the net, update, download all the software, etc. to get ready.

Since I had to do a fresh install, I decided to try out the latest pre-release of Ubuntu Linux, Hoary Hedgehog. Ubuntu is a Debian based distribution. I’ve been using a previous release (Warty Warthog) on this server, but haven’t tried it as a desktop. I downloaded the ISO, and burned it. The install took about 3 hours if you include time for updates, configuring my apt repositories, and testing some multimedia stuff. Much better than my Windows XP installation experience. It looks like a really slick distro, and feels much snappier than my last Fedora Core experience.

It’s missing a few of the tools I’ve gotten used to in RedHat (like a run-level editor), but it’s still in development, and I know how to do all that stuff from the command line anyway, so it’s not a big deal. And I’ve got all the gnome and kde games installed that my wife just loves (while I was on a big World of Warcraft kick I would come home and find the computer rebooted to Linux — my wife actually Linux better than windows!!).

Update: So, I finally got the correct bioses onto the modchip, but in moving the xbox to do the flashing, I lost the modchip’s connection. My xbox now FRAGS (flashing red and green), and is unsuable even without the modchip since I’ve unlocked the hdd. Arrrgggh!

Thanks to a posting on the linode support forums, I found out about this most excellent little webserver, lighttpd. It’s much faster and lightweight than Apache, more on par with Zeus and thttpd, but it also has FastCGI support, which allows PHP and other languages to work with it. So I installed it. It is *very* fast, and with my configuration uses less than 4MB of ram. PHP is using more like 20MB (so I’m going to be working on paring PHP back as much as I can while maintaining features and performance).

The config is quite a bit different from Apache. It doesn’t currently have support for .htaccess files, which while flexible, slow apache down. Instead everything is entered directly into the main config file. I’ve only run into one issue so far getting the rewrite rules for permalinks to work with wordpress and gallery2. Thanks to some helpful tips on the wordpress support forum and the wp-hacks mailing list, I found several solutions for wordpress, one of which is working just fine right now. I’ll be working on gallery2 next (permalinks are currently disabled there).

It’s a great little web server with a whole lot of potential, I look forward to tracking it’s development.

webmages is now running on it’s own linode. The old server is still accessible directly at 65.19.178.4, so you can backup your data (SFTP only). I also have a copy of everything should the server become unavailable in the near future (I can burn a cd for any of my users if need be).

I hope it doesn’t cause too many problems, but I’ve setup what I think are probably sensible defaults for email aliasing for anyone that hasn’t told me what they want their alias to be yet.

The new linode is at the very low end of the spectrum, so the only services running on it are ssh, apache+php, and mysql. So far I’m getting very good performance. The box is only using about 300k of swap and has about 3MB of physical ram left, so I think I’m going to be pretty content with this setup.