{"id":891,"date":"2011-01-21T10:24:46","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T16:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/?p=891"},"modified":"2011-01-21T10:24:46","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T16:24:46","slug":"do-not-read-this-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/do-not-read-this-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Not Read This Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given the fact that I’ve been snowed in at home the last several evenings, I really don’t have anything to post on here.\u00a0 However, I’m on such a roll that I feel I should put in something<\/em>, so I will delight everyone with an update on the status of my latest webserver iteration.\u00a0 As of last night I finally moved it from “work in progress” status to “ready for production.”<\/p>\n

As I’m sure everyone remembers, I recently migrated this site from my long-running NSLU2<\/a> onto a Synology DS111<\/a>.\u00a0 The trusty NSLU2 certainly served me well, especially given the price, but eventually it proved woefully underpowered.\u00a0 As a matter of fact there was a dark period in my life where I actually ran everything on my Windows desktop, but we don’t talk about that.\u00a0 Enter the DS111.\u00a0 After much research I finally decided on that particular unit as a good compromise on hardware, price-point, and energy usage.\u00a0 (Some small part of me still wishes I would have opted for the dual-bay DS211, but that nearly doubled the price.)\u00a0 I was also naively convinced I could set up the entire thing to my liking right out of the box, with no customization required, which would save me a lot of time.\u00a0 I’ve made that same idealistic statement many times before, and it’s never worked out once.\u00a0 Within hours of unpacking it and turning it on I had already flashed it with Optware<\/a>, instantly voiding the warranty but giving me many more “opportunities.”\u00a0 For the first several months I worked with a mix of the stock features and the Optware packages, but by now it’s entirely running the Optware add-ons.\u00a0 So, without further ado, I shall regale you with a fascinating synopsis of the finished product.<\/p>\n

For a while I ran the stock setup;\u00a0 Apache webserver with Synology’s flavor of PHP + MySQL.\u00a0 Honestly this worked fine and I probably could have gotten away with it, but I found myself staring at the system utilization constantly and thinking “It could do better.”\u00a0 So, my first step was to ditch Apache<\/a> for Lighttpd<\/a>, which is what I ran forever on the old NSLU2.\u00a0 I quickly ran into problems getting it to work like I wanted though, so after another bout of research I settled on nginx<\/a>.\u00a0 This proved to be the answer to all life’s problems, with the minor issue of setting up a virtual host.\u00a0 I only need that function occasionally for phpmyadmin<\/a>,\u00a0 so after a half-hearted attempt at wading through nginx’s mostly foreign-language support pages, I settled on using lighttpd for that, and just shutting it back down when I’m finished.\u00a0 The next hurdle was the quirky Synology SQL package.\u00a0 I got it all tuned up like I wanted performance-wise, only to find that the server would hang every time I shut it down.\u00a0 (OK, I didn’t REALLY<\/strong> accidentally turn it off when we were on vacation, I made one final SQL change on the way out the door and it locked up.)\u00a0 I puzzled over this for a few weeks, and finally ended up moving off their stuff onto Optware flavors of the same, which proved more challenging than I anticipated by quite some stretch.<\/p>\n

The final step was some means of preserving all these fascinating changes and updates in case of a system failure.\u00a0 After monkeying around with the built-in backup, and a few other wildly complicated third-party options, I finally enlisted the help of my fellow “tinkerer” Mike<\/a>, who is much more skilled in the ways of the Linux Jedi than I.\u00a0 As it turned out he already had a well-written package of scripts which, with some minor modifications, fit my needs just fabulously and with far less head-scratching than anything else I had tried.\u00a0 I tested it all extensively last night and it worked just peachy.\u00a0 So now you can all sleep well at night knowing this site is auto-magically backed up regularly, albeit not to an off-site location.\u00a0 Speaking of which, I wonder if I could…\u00a0 NO, NO, I AM DONE WITH IT.<\/p>\n

See, I told<\/strong> you not to read this update.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given the fact that I’ve been snowed in at home the last several evenings, I really don’t have anything to post on here.\u00a0 However, I’m on such a roll that I feel I should put in something, so I will delight everyone with an update on the status of my latest webserver iteration.\u00a0 As of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}