Matt’s Space

I feel like such a dufus. According to people who know me, I’m supposed to be this really techy, geeky, person. Well add dufus to the list. Here’s what happened: I wanted incorporate some of the things I was learning about virtualization (at work) into my own servers at home. And by servers, I mean server, but its hosting multiple services such as a mail server, database server, web and blog servers, etc. My goal was to split these up, where possible and provide some type of redundancy and availability. Not that any of that really matters for a site the eats more dollars than it generates, but I digress.

I ended up creating two virtual machines: 1 for email server, 1 for web server. They are both ‘hosted’ on the original hardware, with the VMs actually residing on a remote file server via NFS. The mail server mostly works, it accepts mail for “matte AT neomajic dot com”. I just can’t login to the Dovecot pop3 service to pick it up… But thats another post, though. I used Apache 2 to replace the original Apache server, which was sort of a headache learning how Apache 2 is configured differently than regular Apache. I managed to get most of my sites up and going except for my blog…which has been down for over month. The problem ended up being a link was blown away when I made my backups. This link seemed trivial at first. Its the link that tells my blog’s instance of WordPress where to find its themes used to customized the look of the blog. You’d think the abscence of such link would at least yield some unformatted text or garbage, or something, but it just yields a white screen. There’s nothing descriptive about a white screen that you can Google and I wasn’t getting anything my logs.

This problem was started by, you guessed it, me. Let me first explain a little bit about how WordPress is installed. Lets say you wanted to host blogs for 10 of your bestest friends. Using WordPress, this means that in addition to your single install of Apache, you need to install 10 installs of WordPress. There’s currently no way to share a single install over the 10 instances.

So, in an effort to save some space as far as themes were concerned, I thought I’d at least share all the installed themes in a common point and link back to it via each WordPress share. This works well.

The problem was when I used FileZilla to copy my files from the backup to the new server. Apparently, FileZilla does not like links too much. Fixed the link, viola! My blog is back.

For those of you still awake… here’s an example of the linkage:

Ex.
Blog====> /home/blog/matte
Themes====> /home/blog/themes

Link====> /home/blog/matte/wp-content/themes —> /home/blog/themes

So anyway, I’m back up. I do have a lot on my mind to blog about, so that’s next.

Recently

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.