I’ve got a pretty nice free setup for a webserver I’ve been taking for granted now. So for anyone starting off wanting to setup a server with email, webserver, and database here are some applications I’ve found reliable and somewhat easy to figure out.
A couple of really handy things that may not be obvious when using the RaspberryPi.
(2016 note – Debian ended up winning!)
This took me a bit to figure out and almost had me switch away from FreeBSD to Debian! Oh my! Exciting I’m sure. Briefly this site was completely down due to this.
(2016 update) I actually wondered where this one went!
I’ve got a Raspberry Pi that keeps losing its wifi connection whenever the microwave runs too long. Here’s at least one way to get around this since the wifi doesn’t seem to rescan on its own.
Recently I discovered the Arduino. Its an open source microcontroller that makes playing with electronics more fun for the computer programming savvy. Rather than having to find all sorts of components and understand a bit too much of how they all work, you can have the little microcontroller do it for you. Great! I’ve a couple of “experiment with electronics” sets to compare against and the same projects are 1000000% easier using this whole new fangled ‘computer’ thing. I’ve got many projects planned now.
The first is just scary eyes it being Haloween. Nothing fancy but they are actually a bit creepy from the outside.
Here’s the Arduino and breadboard – pretty easy:
Copying forward posts from an old Drupal install in case they help and also to pad this blog a bit! Also copying the comment on this one since it’s probably better than my post:
I gave into impulse and bought a Raspberry Pi finally. Not sure what I’ll do with it but it cost around $60 (with case and SD card) so why not give it a try?
I have it running Drupal right now. Works fine but a bit slow. I think the slowness is the SD 4 Class SD card serving as the database filesystem though… Use an external USB disk and I bet it’d be decent. Once the pages are in memory its plenty fast.
It’s so tiny:
Who needs a big computer? Me still. Here the Pi is on top of a small box of a computer:
So I switched back to Ubuntu so that I could do me some bitmining. That’s all I’ll say about bitmining, going swimingly.
Switching to Ubuntu I had to move my Django site over. We’re recording all sorts of trivialities there. Normally this goes easily. There was no problem moving from Ubuntu to FreeBSD or between OS X and those. You just copy the project directory over, simple!
But I had switch to Nginx which was a change from using Apache. And I kept randomly getting ‘Template not found’ errors. It’d always work if I connect with the MacBook, but connect with any other computer and I’d get the ‘Template not found’ errors. If the MacBook was on it all worked ok on other computers though. Still I didn’t know the MacBook was the reason it was working yet…
So I’ve been trying to figure out these darn errors. I’d been using FastCGI and was going to blame it so decided to switch from it to uWSGI. I went from FastCGI to uWSGI as the Django server. I thought that finally fixed it but then the errors came back!!! I connected on another random computer and it didn’t work. Then I ssh’d into the Ubuntu server as my user and it worked again!
Solved!
You see Ubuntu can encrypt your home folder. I’ve always just had the Django files in my home folder. The deal was whenever I was on the MacBook since Terminal automatically opens it connected to the Ubuntu server as me and unencrypted my home folder. That’s what happened today too on the other random computer. Tricky. Most of the time Ubuntu unmounted my home folder, encrypted it, and caused the ‘Template not found’ errors since the files were indeed gone. So I moved the folder to somewhere other than my home folder. Many hours wasted on that one!
(Seems like WordPress is this easy as well)
Just so anyone else can feel better about needing to do it, it’s a piece of cake to move a Drupal site from one server to another. I’m very pleased with how easy it is to do that. All you have to do is:
It worked amazingly well! Not a single hiccup.
A note from 2016 – I ended up using TTRSS and it works great!
Like many I recently found out that Google Reader is going away. So after a feeling of loss I set about finding a replacement. For some reason I couldn’t get Tiny Tiny Rich Site Summary to download onto FreeBSD. I think something must be amiss in the distribution files or whatnot.
No matter! It turns out Drupal has a just fine feed aggregator. Sure, it’s missing the ability to ‘star’ entries but I can do without that. So if you’ve lost Google Reader and have Drupal running your set anyhow. I’m just using the default feed aggregator and it seems fine for my needs.