Server died, moved to VPS

March 2nd, 2010 by Belse No comments »

My old work horse from 2002 has died. I think it was the power supply or the motherboard. Well, I took the opportunity to move to the cheapest VPS at ITSTADEN (merged with Serverconnect AB). With only 128 MB of RAM, I had too tweak the installation quite a bit. Nginx + PHP-FPM is now serving my web pages instead of Apache + mod_php. And of course, Ventrilo is up and running with a greatly reduced response time.

For swedish customers, I can recommend ITSTADEN. I took a chance with almost no reviews found via google, and a website that doesn’t contain much documentation. However I have got my tickets solved quickly and everything worked out smoothly. And it’s quite cheap :)

Announcing Gmail Informer

March 2nd, 2010 by Belse No comments »

I’ve created a new page for my latest app: Gmail Informer. It’s a pretty small but very useful gmail inbox notifier. Yes! The world actually needs another one! ;)

The current version, 0.4.1 has some known bugs and I will upload a new version ASAP.

Project hosting

October 18th, 2009 by Belse No comments »

If anyone knows of a good project hosting solution, feel free to comment on this post. I want something similar to Redmine (code browsing + tickets), but I don’t like passengers (Ruby on Rails) huge memory allocation. Maybe a solution in PHP 5?

Modding the link-page of iNove theme

April 7th, 2009 by Belse No comments »

This post is mostly a reminder for myself. I modded the current theme (iNove by mg12) so that the links on the link page are shown in categories.

In links.php I replaced:

<div class="boxcaption"><h3>Blogroll</h3></div>
<div class="box linkcat">
  <ul><?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_li=&categorize=0&orderby=rand'); ?></ul>
  <div class="fixed"></div>
</div>

with:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('category_before=&title_before=<div class="boxcaption"><h3>&title_after=</h3></div><div class="box linkcat">&category_after=<div class="fixed"></div></div>'); ?>

Ugly, but it works great ;)

Securing a shared server with mpm-itk

April 6th, 2009 by Belse 2 comments »

While searching for how I could secure my web server environment I came across this wonderful post. I was already used suPHP. Replacing it with mpm-itk was very simple since mpm-itk were already in the Intrepid repositories.

Upgraded to Intrepid

April 4th, 2009 by Belse No comments »

Very soon, Jaunty is going to be released. In mean time, I decided to upgrade my server from Hardy to Intrepid. I don’t know actually what I was thinking. Why should I upgrade something that’s still supported and runs without problems? On intrepids plus side, intrepid had packages for libcap2. I had only installed these from a PPA-repository previously. On the down-side, I had problems running the new Xorg on the same hardware when Intrepid was brand new. I just couldn’t get tv-out to work regardless of how hard I tried with my Geforce 6200.

Well, how did it go then?

Oh… It was the smoothest release-upgrade ever! Wow :) OK, xorg struggled. But it wasn’t harder than: resetting the xorg.conf, starting xorg, let jockey install the correct driver, restart and set up twinview (clone) using nvidia-settings.

Now, I just wait for proftpd v1.3.2 to hit the repositories. In the mean time, I use proftpd debian packages.

Jobeet, an advent calendar

December 4th, 2008 by Belse No comments »

Just perfect timing! I was going to learn using the symfony php-framework and version 1.2 has just gone stable. In addition there is now an advent calendar. Every day from 1st December to Christmas there will be hourly long tutorials on how to use symfony to create a modern web application from scratch.

You can find it here.

Changing file permissions recursively

November 26th, 2008 by Belse No comments »

I often find myself wanting to both change the owner and file permissions of my web served files. When apache creates new files, the owner becomes www-data, and I can’t manipulate those files directly without changing the ownership to me. Also, apache can’t write to files if they aren’t writable by group. Well. The solution is very simple; I should fix my suPHP installtion. It worked some time ago but no longer. Anyway. The following three commands are a lifesaver.

sudo chown xxx:yyy -R .
find -type f -exec chmod 664 \{\} \;
find -type d -exec chmod 775 \{\} \;

The first one change ownership of files to user xxx group yyy recursively. The second one change permissions of all regular files (not directories) to whatever you want to (664 here). The third one change permissions of all directories. I want my directories to be executable, while I usually don’t want my files to be that. Find handles that for me.

Finally found my CMS

November 26th, 2008 by Belse No comments »

I can’t recall how many times I’ve been wanting to change my homepage. I’ve been looking for the “perfect” CMS to host my pages and tried out all kinds of more or less complete applications available. Well, I think I’ll settle with wordpress. It has, with a few plugins the following features that I require.

  • It should have a blog with a basic WYSIWYG editor and possibility to syntax highlight code.
  • Possibility to easily run custom PHP-code.
  • Upload files for use in blog-posts and in a separate download page.
  • Looks good without too much tweaking.
  • Integrate all above features very tightly.

Ok. Wordpress is mainly a blog but it has some CMS features, especially with a few extra plugins. It is however great for a single user.

I prefer to use an already existing solution than writing my own. Also, everything needs to work without too much tweaking. I don’t want the application to break if I ever need to upgrade it because of a security hole.