Mokka mit Schlag » 2006 » March

So far the Mini is chugging along quite happily. Here are a few hopefully final notes.

At various points over the last day the Mini would spontaneously lose its ability to find the router and thus could not connect to external systems. However external systems could connect to it. Possibly this was related to using DHCP with manual addressing. I switched over to static addressing and so far it seems fine.

The WordPress transfer was smoother than I expected but not as smooth as it could or should be. For one thing, the URL of the site should probably not be stored in various places in the main database. That makes it too hard to move to a different URL. Instead it should be stored in the config file along with the database user name and password. Furthermore it should be stored once. Storing it in multiple places and then doing a search and replace in the SQL script to update risks breaking links that shouldn’t be changed. I still have to search for any broken links here and fix them.
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OK. So this wasn’t exactly a trivial operation, and there may yet be a few glitches. (I can already see that some of the internal stylesheets didn’t come over.) but if you’re reading this then the transition is a success. All three of my locally hosted sites are now served by a Mac Mini running the latest and greatest versions of WordPress, MySQL, Apache, and PHP.

On the down side, in 2.0.2 the so called rich editor appears to have gotten richer and harder to use. It even seems to be hard wrapping unexpectedly. Why, oh why, does everyone hate plain text so much?

I’m going to bed. See you tomorrow.

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, 2.0.2, and copied it over the old version. It started up fine, but couldn’t connect to the database server. No surprise. I haven’t imported my old database tables yet.

After setting up the database and importing the old database data, the site seemed to work. However, on further investigation all the links went to the old site (cafe.elharo.com) and not to the new site (minicafe.elharo.com). That’s weird. On top of that, the equivalent URLs at the new site were 404. Hmm, there’s probably something in the database that points to the old URL. Yep, that’s it all right. Seems I have to edit the SQL directly before importing it in the new server. Bleah.
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Now that I’ve got one site working on the Mini, it’s time to set up the other two. Naturally this requires virtual hosts. Since I’m not ready to switch off the current production server yet, I added a few more host names I can use until I am: minicafe.elharo.com for cafe.elharo.com, xom.elharo.com for www.xom.nu, and blog.elharo.com for www.elharo.com. (These are only accessible from inside my internal subnet so don’t try to connect to them.)
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I’ve now returned from Software Development 2006 and am ready to continue moving this server to my new Mac Mini. I had left it turned off while I was away. I turned it on, and loaded the first site into my browser; or rather I tried to load the first site. I couldn’t connect. Hmm, did I forget the IP address? Nope, I forgot to setup Apache to automatically launch at system startup. Let’s fix that.
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This site is currently served by an ADSL line in my apartment as are several others I maintain. I recently noticed that my NAT/router/firewall device (a D-Link Airplus extreme-G Router) can’t map multiple IPs. That is, it forwards all port 80 requests to the same system. It can’t send requests for different external IP addresses to different internal IP addresses. This means I can only run one physical HTTP server.

Would anyone care to recomend a slightly more capable NAT? I don’t need anything fancy or complicated. I’ve been relatively happy with the D-Link. Essentially I’d just want more one feature, full many-to-many port forwarding. otherwise I still want an integrated box that acts as a firewall, NAT, gigabit Ethernet router, and wireless router in one.