Preparing Ubuntu Server for Drupal
In light of my recent experiences with moving Drupal onto a backup server, it seems like a good time to do a short write up of the things that are required to get Drupal up and running on Ubuntu Server - not the actually installation of Drupal on that server though (that will likely wait until I have a need to install from scratch again). Note that all commands require root access to run - generally just prefixing sudo to each will be sufficient. First ensure that you have a LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) server set up; the easiest...
My New Backup and Testing Server
A few weeks ago, a stray lightning bolt managed to create a power surge through our cable - and through that our network - damaging three unfortunate pieces of networking equipment. Two gigabit switches, a cat6 Ethernet cable, and a gigabit card fell before this power surge, of these one of the switches, the cable, and the card were mine. The switch is still managing to limp along - some ports simply don’t support gigabit speeds anymore. The network card, which was the one installed on my server, was completely taken out, forcing me to switch to the 100mps onboard...
Ubuntu Server Installation - Using USB Instead of CDROM
If every time I installed a Linux distribution I burned a CD, I would go through CDs at a prodigious rate. Fortunately, USB drives are now large enough to hold a CD’s - or even a DVD - data on it, and by making the drive bootable (and having a motherboard which has BIOS that supports booting from USB) it is simple to install from a USB drive. In this case, I am installing Ubuntu Server 32 bit edition (normally I would use 64 bit, but this is a rather old desktop) from my microsd card. To load the ISO...
BotNet Attack Counter
In light of my current issues with some botnet scanning me regularly I have decided to add a block to the main page of my site, which will appear in the lower left side. Entitled “Vulnerability Scan Counter”, I will enumerate the number of scans that my site has endured as a botnet repeated attempts to find unconfigured services - ones that I do not have on my site. Although the futility of its attempts is somewhat entertaining, I do find it rather irritating to find that the majority of the hits on my site are attacks. Hopefully, later versions...
DVD Drive Autoclose edev Bug
Since my switch to Gentoo, my DVD drive has decided that it really prefers to stay closed. In order to further its goals in this area, it was closing seconds after opening, making swapping out disks nigh impossible. After a substantial amount of work to make Google return a result that even remotely resembled my problem, I came across a relatively recent post in the Ubuntu forums where a number of people had a similar problem - curiously all on Macs with Pioneer DVD drives (a hardware configuration which most definitely does not resemble my setup) - from which I...