Misc. Ramblings

My long-term goal is to have my own web server at home to host my site. I'm headed down this road because I'm having problems with my present hosting company, pair.com. MovebleType (MT), the application that manages my blog page, is apparently taking too much memory when it creates its web pages. As a temporary measure, I've switched to dynamic creation of part of my site. This, for now, seems to keep things stable. But as the number of posts increase, I will need to switch more of my site to dynamic creation. This is not something I want to do because it creates a single point of failure. Namely, the database that holds all the posts. Under a static system, it doesn't matter what happens to MovebleType or the database where posts are stored. If I choose to switch to something else, the pages created are still there (although back end stuff like searching wouldn't work).

There are, of course, downsides to hosting your own site. I don't have the time to go into them but it comes down to time, reliability, and security. Speaking of which, I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to dive right in.

Last night, I downloaded and installed PC-BSD version 1.0. This is a version of Unix based on FreeBSD. As you may remember, I've been looking for an industrial strength operating system to host a website and mail server. I decided to start with what my current web host, pair.com, uses. Namely, FreeBSD.

But in installing FreeBSD, I found a very barren landscape. After installing the latest version, I sat there staring at a blinking command line cursor. That was it. Nothing was mounted. No applications installed. No KDE or Gnome. Just an operating system. That's when I decided I needed something a little more user friendly if I was to ever get my own server up and running.

Thus my search for something else. PC-BSD version 1.0 is one of two efforts (the other being Desktop BSD, which I will try sometime in the future) to configure BSD with an more user friendly interface.

I downloaded the single image file and burned it to a CD. Once done, I installed it to an old 850MHz Celeron system with 256MB of RAM. The install process took about 35 minutes (your time may vary), most of which is taken up by the default install of packages. Once completed, you boot into the familiar KDE GUI.

While KDE is much better than the command line, you still have to download and install the applications you plan to run on your server. In my case, I started with the Apache web server . PC-BSD has a version (2.0.54) that you can download, double click on, and have it installed for you. While this is a very easy way to install the software, the downside is this is not the most current version. Thus, you will be missing security updates that have been made since the release of this version. Although using the pre-configured PC-BSD version certainly is user friendly, I have a nagging feeling I will end up trying to compile the latest Apache server from source code so I can keep it up-to-date.

But for now, I'll be spending my time learning how to run this version of Apache. Once I get past that, I'll move on to installing MySQL and MT. Next up after that will be a mail server.

As mentioned, I don't have a lot of time to work on this project so reports on this will come as and when I can.

UPDATE: Who knew? There is a ready made file called PAMP that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP all in one clickable install file for PC-BSD. Now, all I have to do is uninstall Apache and then install PAMP.