I would like to thank buckrey who posted these notes on how to go about setting up mini_sendmail to allow mail to be sent for things like user registration, etc..
October 27, 2005
Cooper’s Hawk Spotted in Backyard
Just spotted this bird perched on a tree in our backyard not too far from the birdfeeder — though I figure he was looking for a
critter dinner! I thought is was a Falcon but Ilise looked it up and says it’s a Cooper’s Hawk.
October 26, 2005
Setting up My Blog Server
While this is not a “How-to”, I will at least try to hit the high points of getting a WordPress instance up and running on an old box that I recently “inherited” from my father-in-law. The Hardware The box is a Dell Dimension V350 — a Pentium II, 350 MHz machine with 256MB RAM and two hard drives 8 GB and 60 GB ( I added the second). Basically a decent box to run as Unix server (even though it was pretty pokey when it was trying to run Windows 2000). The Operating System I chose to use OpenBSD version 3.7 as the operating system for this project for a few reasons:
- Secure by default
- PHP and MySQL readily available for install
- I’ve dabbled with Open BSD before and am enamored with its simplicity
Configuration Open BSD is a fairly straight forward install. Your main choices involve partition sizes and which parts of the OS to install. I opted not to install games or anything involving X — don’t need a GUI for a server. The partition sizes used were:
- / 80 MB
- (swap) 300 MB
- /usr 2 GB
- /tmp 100 MB
- /home ~5.5 GB (the remainder of the 8 GB drive)
- /var ~60GB (the whole 60 GB drive)
The OS install is followed by the typical afterboot tasks like creating a regular user, adding the cd-drive to /etc/fstab, enabling httpd (i.e. Apache), disabling root logins via ssh, etc. . Installing PHP and MySQL is a snap using the pkg_add command and specifying the ftp location of the package. pkg_add takes care of the dependencies and provides instructions on any manual steps that might be required. The packes I explicitly added were:
- php4-core-4.3.11
- php4-mysql-4.3.11
- mysql-server-4.0.23p1
A paper on OAMP (OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server setup and web page on setting up a mysql database server on OpenBSD provide useful information on getting all the parts working together while leaving apache in its default mode of running in a “chroot’ed” environment, and some additional steps to “batten-down-the-hatches,” as it were. The final step of installing WordPress was a breeze — just follow the simple and very brief instructions and it just worked (this post is proof of that :-) ).