midtoad's blog

Mac Mini webserver

The more I use Mac OS X on my MacBook, the less I find I have the energy for dealing with all the problems and hassles of Windows and Linux. Not to say that there aren't issues with OS X, but I do find fewer. And so, for quite a while now I've been wanting to dump Mandriva Linux (and the old, noisy PC it's running on), and replace it with a small, quiet Mac Mini running OS X. Over the course of the past 24 hours, that's just what I did. You're reading this page being served up by the new server.

Since I have set up a number of web servers using Linux, I anticipated that doing the same thing in OS X would be easier, and it largely was, with one exception due to my own stupidity. More on that later. I consulted a number of articles on how to use the Mini as a server. Here are a couple:

• Nerdvittles ISP in a box (there's a ton of other useful stuff for Mac owners at this site besides the mentioned tutorial)
• Using a Mac Mini as a personal server (i.e. on your own home network)

I installed Python, Moin-Moin, MySQL, CherrPy, Frog blog, and a variety of utility programs.

Then I copied over the contents of my entire existing webserver, and tweaked the settings, since Apache stores web files in a different location in OS X than it does in in Linux.

Oh yeah, the hard part. I was unable to access my Rigid Wings wiki from outside the home network. I struggled with this for quite a while (it was too long after midnight), then realized it was due to the fact that in the moin.py config file I'd specified that the wiki should only pay attention to the localhost interface. Since I didn't just want people on localhost to be able to see the wiki, I need to change the setting to ''.

File copying problems with USB drives

I've discovered a problem with copying files between two USB drives connected to a PC (or Mac). Simply put, you can't copy large quantities of files from one external USB drive to another. This is extremely frustrating!

Fixing Windows with Linux

Recently my wife's notebook crashed (flaky power supply?), and would not start again. Nothing would get it going, not even the Windows XP CD. Finally I tried booting the notebook via a Knoppix linux CD... and had it running soon after!

Thinking about backups

I'm thinking a lot about backups this week, ever since one of my external drives was corrupted after I shut off the power on my unresponsive Mac. And in looking around on the internet for information on this topic, I'm noticing a trend.

Lost all my music and photos

Catastrophe strikes! The drive that stores all my music (140 GB of it) and all my digital photos got hammered and became unreadable. I've spent most of my free time over a week trying to get it going. Along the way I learned a few things.

Oops - hammered my old blog

My old blog is at midtoad.homelinux.org/wp/. This morning I tried to check a story on it, and the blog page wouldn't appear. Hmm. When I tried to do anything with the blog, such as log into the admin function, I kept getting errors, in particular sql error 28. The handy on-line mysql manual said I could execute a repair command on the database, so I tried that on a couple of tables that failed an integrity check. The repair command never completed though, so I aborted it after several minutes. Then I logged into mysql at the command line, and got an error message saying that the tables I'd tried to repair were empty. Oops!

Then I noticed that I had no space left on my hard drive. How could that be? WTF? My mailbox was 50 MB in size, so I deleted all of the messages. Then I recalled that I'd recently tried to upload a 10GB file to my webserver for a friend, and my hard drive is only 10 GB in size. Yep, that'll do it! After deleting it, I was back to a more manageable amount of free space.

I was able to repair my database by extracting the relevant sql statements from my database backup file (you DO back up your databases, don't you?). All is well, and you can now read my old blog again. Whew!

New network config

After being off-line for a few days over the winter solstice, I'm back with a new network configuration. If anything doesn't work like it used to, please drop me a line.

Firewall follies

This blog was unavailable for a couple of days after I moved it back to the main webserver from my backup webserver. After wandering down several dead-end paths, I finally determined the issue was with my webserver's internal firewall. As always with this stuff, the answer seems so obvious in retrospect.

Webserver woes

Posted Tuesday Nov. 1st... If you've been trying to gain access to this site over the past couple days, you'll have noticed periods of unavailability of the server. There's no set of rack-mounted servers here with a full RAID system for extra reliability, all serviced by a trained maintenance team; instead, there's a single NSLU2, and a frustrated owner sitting a long way in an office wondering why he can't access his own website.

Something is causing my server to lock up periodically, and I don't know what it is. I don't even have enough diagnostic tools at this point to tell if the CPU is getting overtaxed, or the memory is being all used up, or a rogue process is taking over the whole system, or it's something else. I'll be doing some troubleshooting over the next few days, and apologize for any inconvenience.

Crackers are out there

I'd only had the new server on the 'net about an hour before I noticed a log file that keeps track of password failures. I peeked into it and was surprised to see a whole lot of failed login attempts from an IP address in the 211. range (i.e. China) - and the next day, a bunch from the 218. range (Hong Kong). Obviously no one I know! I've taken steps to shut down any more such attempts.