OnTheFive Blog

Well, starting on yet another endeavor, Alex and I have started up Talk Fostoria. It’s a place where people can easily talk about Fostoria issues and discuss recent/upcoming local events.  A lot of work went into modifying the styles to look the best for our site.  I hope everyone checks it out and gets registered.  Remember, new users are constantly signing up and this is gradually covering more topics.  Don’t be afraid, too, to start your own thread! I guarantee it will be responded to.

Enjoy!

Well, after HOURS of continuous work, I am proud to say that OnTheFive is now running on its new 250GB RAID1 setup. It’s a spanking-new installation of SuSE 10.2, and the essentials were not installed from RPM. I installed mysql from binary download from their site, and Apache and PHP from source. I think every option I would want in PHP is compiled in, and I’m really pleased with how it worked out. There were quite a few little quirks along the way, which I will try to outline.

MySQL Import

I had a difficult time with the MySQL databases during this upgrade. First, I was unable to keep TalkFostoria.com running during the upgrade. This was because my server from home, Gemini, was running SuSE 9.1 and had a much older version of MySQL. The dump from Raptor was incompatible.

After the upgrade, I then had to import all of the databases back into the new installation. Both the old and the new were running MySQL 5.0.x. In order to complete the transfer, I went into the BIOS and set the 40GB drive as first in the boot order, and actually booted into the old installation. Then I used to phpMyAdmin to dump all the databases, which was wrong. I should have dumped all of them except for information_schema. Then, after actually deleting the ‘mysql’ database, I imported the dump: ‘mysql -p < dump.sql' The key was in omitting the non-importable 'information_schema' db, and in first deleting the 'mysql' db.

Apache installation

I definitely messed up installing apache. I wanted it installed in /usr/local/apache2/ but accidentally ran ./configure with –prefix=/usr/local for some reason thinking it would go into ./apache2 . Instead, it installed to /usr/local and I had to sort through all the files in /usr/local to see what should have been in there and what needed to be deleted. I compared my system to another SuSE 10 box to help decide.

PHP options (gd, mbstring, etc)

Compiling PHP exactly the way I wanted it was a little tricky.  I really wanted to have gd installed ( –with-gd ) and also with jpeg and png support. It turns out that ./configure was looking for the .so extensions without any version numbers, so installing the -devel packages in YaST for libjpeg and libpng took care of creating the necessary symlinks for ./configre to complete sucessfully.  I used ./config.nice a lot to help me get this installed.  Here is my final ./configure command.  Note the path for MySQLi is to the mysql_config command, and mbstring is –enable-mbstring.
‘./configure’ ‘–with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs’ ‘–prefix=/usr/local/php’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql’ ‘–with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config’ ‘–with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-jpeg’ ‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib’ ‘–with-png-dir=/usr/lib’ ‘–with-zlib-dir=/usr/lib’ ‘–with-curl’ ‘–enable-mbstring’

Old vs. New Startup Scripts and Config Files

In the old system, most everything was configured for me already.  All config files were located in /etc and the startup scripts are in /etc/init.d.  In order to copy over the /etc/init.d scripts, I had to edit some of them to have the right binary locations.  Many of the previous binaries were located in /usr/sbin.  My httpd config files are now in /usr/local/apache2/config.  I edited my httpd.conf to include my old vhosts.conf which I copied from the old 40gb installation to my /usr/local/apache2/conf.

Port timing out

There is still a 2 minute delay in startup because libata insists on softrestarting while trying to scan ports that have no drives attached to them.  Much more information can be seen on my post at SuSE Linux Support Forums.

Overall it was a pretty smooth experience.  The relatively cheap SATA card installed without a hitch, and SuSE 10.2 took care of everything.

Alright, so I’m really having a ball with this domain of mine.  My server back at home is now online, and of course had to be put under the domain.  It was previously called gemini, so I figured I would keep it the same.  Now that I have 2 servers, I of course have to have some kind of naming scheme.  With gemini being a zodiac sign I looked up the rest of them and realizd, none of them are really cool, and most are a pain to spell.

So now, my naming scheme is Cedar Point roller coaster names, which Gemini fits into.  The main server at alex’s house is now named “Raptor”, after my favorite ride at cedar point.  Other names can later include: Blue [Streak], Corkscrew, [Iron] Dragon, Junior [Gemini], Magnum, Mantis, Millenium [Force], [Top Thrill] Dragster, Wicked [Twister], Wildcat, and Maverick.  By the time I have more servers that this, Cedar Point will have built more rides for me to name them after.

But don’t be suprised if you try pinging all of those and get replies.  Remember, I have the wildcard (*.onthefive.com) still going to raptor (alex’s house).  Also, I’m currently trying to work to get my MySQL database backup script going again. I really liked what I had before: Each backup was a folder (mysqldump_yyyy-mm-dd) with several databasename.sql files inside it.  I could also easily add .gz or .bz2 compression to save space on the small backup drive.  Till next time.

Ok so randomly I decided to add daily time-synchronization to the server. This is accomplished quite easily by adding on entry to cron. Again, crontab -e (under root) which opens VI to edit root’s cron entry. Then I added:

#       Every day @ 1:00AM - update the time
0 1 * * * (/usr/sbin/ntpdate -s -b -p 8 -u 69.222.103.98)

This calls ntpdate (just a pre-installed) client program to update the time using NTP. The switches: -s diverts output to syslog instead of stdout (I don’t want this thing yelling at me at 1am when I’m putty-ed in). -b uses settimeofday() rather than adjtime() - not sure why, but it was recommended. I don’t ask questions. -p 8 uses 8 samples rather than the default 4 - must be more accurate, right? -u uses outgoing packets instead of a privelaged port - recommended for firewalled boxes - might work without this, but I don’t really care.

All of the information for setting that up is at akadia.com under the Section “Configuration on Unix: Unix Workstation as NTP Client”. The IP address I used came from NIST.gov .

Also, since I now have a domain name and can have many different IP addresses as sub-domains, this main server can’t just be called OnTheFive (even tho onthefive.com and *.onthefive.com will take you there). So I am now naming the server at Alex’s house “alpha” (it’s host name is alpha.onthefive.com). Enjoy.

So… I decided earlier today to go ahead and register onthefive.com, considering alex’s IP hasn’t changed in years…. and so what if it does? there will just be a few minutes of dead time before the new IP propegates to all the nameservers around the world (because we know I will notice and update it immediately…)  So if you’re in the US, it should be fine about 5 minutes later.  If you’re in China you’re screwed…  It’ll probably take the full 48 hours (and still fall apart right out of the box).

So now, I have the LONG, tedious task ahead of me, of changing every damn mweb.kicks-ass.net to onthefive.com.  Its so worth it tho.  Enjoy the less hassle of speaking our address to friends!

Alright, so there haven’t been many updates to the MWeb Blog lately… This is pretty much because since the last post, I have moved to Dayton and now attend the University of Dayton. I’m pretty well settled in now, and I’ve been trying to get a lot done on MWeb. A good deal of my time has been spent on HPadmin - A tool somewhat similar to phpMyAdmin that I’ve been developing to do administrative tasks on HoTTProxy - the WAP Proxy that provides connectivity to mobile phones. I’ve also been making changes little by little to www.MWeb and jonathon.MWeb.

Backups
So before I left, I did manage to get the original 4GB hard drive installed in MWeb for backup and is mounted as /backup. I had to add the entry:

/dev/hdd2            /backup              reiserfs   defaults              1 2

to the /etc/fstab file. This caused a lot of problems becuase usually a second hard drive would be referred to as hdb but for some reason, Linux saw it as the fourth drive, and named it hdd. Also, note that it is partition 2 (hdd2). This is becuase it is still the same partitioning from the original MWeb SuSE 9.1 installation. And partition 1 was the original swap partition. I could also list that for additional swap, but I prefer to leave this hard drive for only backups, and not constant swap space. Additionaly, I had to remember to first actually create the directory /backup before Linux would mount the volume to that location.

I also have reinstalled the cronjob that backs up /srv and /etc weekly. Also, the cronjob had been reinstated that weekly checks /backup for .tar.bz2 files that are older than 60 days old and removes them. This is to prevent the small 4GB drive from being filled.

I have yet to find and reinstall the cronjob that does automatic weekly dumps of the MySQL databases. Apparently this is one thing I forgot to save. Shouldn’t be very hard though.

Stay tuned, as I have lots of new ideas! Also, a wiki is available here! (If I have it working again…)

New on MWeb! - There’s now a forum on mweb powered by phpbb2.  Check It Out.  REGISTER! and Leave any suggestions you think of…

All the MWeb services have been running on the new server for about 2 weeks now, but I’ve had tons of problems that are mostly my fault… I just last night at about 3am got the php-mysql extention installed so that I could use wordpress, phpmyadmin, etc.  The problem came from the fact that SuSE10 came with php4-something and mysql 4.1.13 methinks.  I wanted to have the most recent packages, including php5.1.12 and mysql5.0.18.  To acheive this, I went into yast and added the Factory tree of OSS SuSE as my install source.  Seemed like an OK thing to do, as I could get the latest packages and their required dependencies, no problem.

Well there were problems, aka dependency nightmare. Long story short, YaST’s software manage is screwed up bigtime.  Check out this post on Linuxquestions.org.  So I ended up just using smart to install the latest mysql and php-mysql extention, to get by.  There’s a lot of fine-tuning I’d like to do yet.

 To do:

• Install Backup Drive
• Setup cron backup jobs
• Re-write MTA startup script using LSB stuff

New Features on MWeb!

• mta server:   MWeb is a dedicated server for MTA:SA (Multi-Theft Auto mod for San Andreas)  Email Alex or Myself (change the [at] to @ and [dot] to . )  if you’d like access info.
• ventrilo server:  MWeb is also hosting a ventrilo server. Again, Email Alex or Myself (change the [at] to @ and [dot] to . )  if you’d like access info.
• SPEED!  This thing is now running on a P4 2.4Ghz with 512MB RAM.  If you’d like something hosted, but have no server, Email me, and we’ll see if we can help you out.  Nothing Bandwidth-intensive, as we’re on a 5MBps RoadRunner connection. Small MySQL Databases, or simple PHP scripts are fine.

Ok last night i got SuSE 10 installed and some config files copied over to alex’s old dell. More tonight?