After many many reinstalls today I have finally made a little more progress. The server comes up on my local network and I can ssh in to it from my laptop. Plus Apache is set up and running and will serve files over the local network. Again, this is all pretty easy, but that dosen't mean it doesn't feel good the first time you see a page from your server load up in a browser on a different machine. It's alive!
Wow, it's so cool. One of the big things that I was hoping to accomplish by making this move is getting more control over the tools I use. PHP is the main one. It is a web scripting language. It has a built in "vocabulary" of commands that it understands. But the language is also extensible, and the community (it's open source) has written tons of packages that you can add to the base install of PHP which extend PHP's abilities. But I've never been able to install any that weren't already installed on my old server (although, truthfully, it had almost everything I wanted to play with.)
Anyway, my impression was that adding these extensions was going to be a slight pain. I had some fear that I would have to recompile PHP and be linking it to these new things. I knew just enough to scare myself over the possible complexity.
Turns out you just say:
yum install x
where 'x' is the name of the package you want to install. That's it! (Well, okay, you have to restart Apache: apachectl graceful.)
I did run into a problem with one of the extensions I've been dying to get my hands on: mailparse. This will help me in improving the scripts that accept image uploads through email (this is crucial for my camera phone plans.) It's distressing to run into an error, but I am working out the methodology for dealing.
Find the error log where whatever it is that isn't working would be reporting errors. Look in there (like: tail -f /var/log/https/error_log) and if you see an error message for the thing that isn't working, put a few of the key phrases into google and see what you get. In my case I got a bunch of really recent hits on exactly my error. And also a work around which just involved installing another package.
Read the logs. Read the man pages. Google. The answer is out there.
Tomorrow I need to work on some more tangible work on some of the sites I am building and/or maintaining, but hopefully I will have a little time to keep moving on this. If I am really feeling bold I will break ground on the mail server. Looks like it's going to be postfix.
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- jim 9-18-2005 1:21 am
Wow, it's so cool. One of the big things that I was hoping to accomplish by making this move is getting more control over the tools I use. PHP is the main one. It is a web scripting language. It has a built in "vocabulary" of commands that it understands. But the language is also extensible, and the community (it's open source) has written tons of packages that you can add to the base install of PHP which extend PHP's abilities. But I've never been able to install any that weren't already installed on my old server (although, truthfully, it had almost everything I wanted to play with.)
Anyway, my impression was that adding these extensions was going to be a slight pain. I had some fear that I would have to recompile PHP and be linking it to these new things. I knew just enough to scare myself over the possible complexity.
Turns out you just say:
yum install x
where 'x' is the name of the package you want to install. That's it! (Well, okay, you have to restart Apache: apachectl graceful.)
I did run into a problem with one of the extensions I've been dying to get my hands on: mailparse. This will help me in improving the scripts that accept image uploads through email (this is crucial for my camera phone plans.) It's distressing to run into an error, but I am working out the methodology for dealing.
Find the error log where whatever it is that isn't working would be reporting errors. Look in there (like: tail -f /var/log/https/error_log) and if you see an error message for the thing that isn't working, put a few of the key phrases into google and see what you get. In my case I got a bunch of really recent hits on exactly my error. And also a work around which just involved installing another package.
Read the logs. Read the man pages. Google. The answer is out there.
Tomorrow I need to work on some more tangible work on some of the sites I am building and/or maintaining, but hopefully I will have a little time to keep moving on this. If I am really feeling bold I will break ground on the mail server. Looks like it's going to be postfix.
- jim 9-18-2005 3:36 am