Office Cafe

Alone But Not Lonely

Today I spent a little time at Starbucks. I had been doing errands and one errand took me to the same plaza as one of the oldest Starbucks in the county. I stopped in to sit and think for a while. I was alone, but thanks to friends who were already there, I was not lonely. Our conversations were brief, but just long enough to connect and get caught up.

It is good to sit and think. An idea popped into my head and fortunately for me, the iPhone works great in this situation. I wanted a quick answer to a technical question, and within a few minutes I was reading a post from someone who had already gone down the road I was about to go down myself.

It is a good time to think about business and family, too. Goals and new ideas can be brought to mind by just looking around the room. This time someone thoughtfully left today’s newspaper on the small round coffee table next to me. I don’t know what new ideas may come from the headlines I scanned or the article that I read. Sometimes that doesn’t come for a couple of days. But just the act of being there usually makes the stop about more than just the coffee.

I do not discount the value of just relaxing. But today I needed mental stimulus. And I found it. I remembered a small project that I had in mind. I needed a part for the next step. And I realized that I had one more stop on the errand trail today.

Tags: Errands, Think

Office Cafe Server Move

Sometimes I insist on doing things the hard way. I needed to reinstall my server’s operating system. That is, I needed to update the FreeBSD installation on one particular machine. Just to make things interesting, I also updated to the latest version of WordPress at the same time. So to accomplish the reinstallation, I first moved my entire WordPress blog to another physical server. We’ll see, but I may never move it back! For now, everything is back to normal. Now that everything is working, I will go back to the original server and rebuild the entire server. Why do I need to do everything over again? Since the time I built that server, I have standardized my installations and that machine was no longer conforming to the new standard.

Yes, I am hosting my own web server (servers actually). I am doing this mainly for the instructional value. (It also keeps my brain thinking along some very technical lines. I suppose I could just settle for Sudoku, but there is something very therapeutic about hosting your own web server)!

And to make sure that the job would be complicated, I configured FreeBSD and Apache to serve up Name-Based as well as IP-Based Virtual Hosts simultaneously. What that means is that this server is hosting multiple domains on at least two distinct IP addresses from the same physical machine. Crazy? For sure! Why do it? Let’s just say that there is a lot of educational value in digging into the details.

Bryan J. Hong’s book, Building A Server With FreeBSD 7, sure came in handy. Although he doesn’t cover the Virtual Hosts in any detail, lots of information about the topic is available at the Apache web site.

There are a lot of moving parts to servers. The details are pretty intense. Fortunately, Hong keeps things pretty simple and nearly complete. Check it out.

Anyway, moving the installation from one server to another server was not simple, but neither was it impossible. The fact that you can even see these words is proof enough for me that I got a few things right along the way. It was also fun to make it all happen.

I suggest trying this yourself, just for the fun of it (and if you are into technical things like Unix, virtual servers, intrusion detection, honeypots, bringing new life to old hardware, etc.)!

Tags: Virtual Hosting