Planet Cyprix » Servers

New server (with photos)

cyprix — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:47:09 +0000

As part of an overall upgrade for my systems, I’m moving to a brand new server. It’s my first rackmount server at 1U high and will be going into a colocation centre soonish.

It will be running a variety of applications including:

Mandriva Linux 2010.0
Web Serving: Nginx, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3
Mail: Postfix, Dovecot, RoundCube
DNS: PowerDNS, Bind
Database: MySQL
Virtual Hosting: VirtualBox

Server Specifications:

Intel SR1530HSH with S3200SHVL Motherboard. 320w PSU, 3x Hot Swap SATA HDD, 2x Gb Nic
Intel Q9550 Processor – 4x 2.83ghz, 12mb cache, e0 stepping
Intel Q9400 Processor – 4x 2.66ghz, 6mb cache, r0 stepping
4x 2gb (8gb total) Kingston DDR2 800Mhz Ram
2x 1Tb Seagate Hard Drives (in RAID 1)

Update: Unfortunately, the E0 stepping Q9550 is not supported for the bios of the s3200 motherboard, so I’ve had to switch down to the Q9400 with only 6mb cache .

Photos:

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Front

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Rear

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Top

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Inside

[Solved] WordPress automatic upgrade and nginx

cyprix — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:19:53 +0000

With my slow move over to nginx I’ve been finding the odd niggle to solve. Today’s one was the inability for my wordpress installations to use the automatic upgrade facility whilst running on nginx. Instead it kept asking to fall back to ftp for upgrading.

On apache, this can occur when your wordpress directory does not have write permissions for the apache user. But I’d already checked that. So I got thinking…

Since nginx and php fastcgi are separate processes I checked the users they were running under – lo and behold the php-fcgi was running under root!!! Big oops! Solution: change php-fcgi to run as user nginx & group nginx (same as the nginx server under Mandriva). As I currently use the spawn-fcgi program I changed by init.d file to use the user and group options as shown below.

/usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi -u nginx -g nginx

All fixed

At some stage I’ll post my init.d file for php-fcgi and my nginx configuration files once they become somewhat stable.

Migrating to nginx, php 5.3, mysql 5.1, mandriva 2010… and more

cyprix — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:40:16 +0000

Lots going on at the moment. I’m migrating most of mine and my clients websites to nginx from apache in preparation for moving everything to a new server.

First thoughts? Nginx is super fast, reasonably easy to configure (once you figure out the php issues) and saves a heap on memory. Downside? I’ve had the odd niggle with moving old sites across – especially since I’m moving to php 5.3 and MySQL 5.1 at the same time, otherwise all good.

The other major change is the look of this blog. The old K2 theme was becoming an issue to deal with (mainly because I didn’t update it enough) so I’ve now moved to this lovely theme: inove. I’ve also done a fresh wordpress install of 2.8.4 and added pretty links – so anyone linking to the old structure might have the odd issue, but otherwise should be painless. Oh yeah – any images on the older posts (pre Aug 2009) are gone.

Anyway here is a list of upgrades currently underway:

php 5.2.x to 5.3.0
mysql 5.0 to mysql-max 5.1
apache 2.2/mod_php to nginx 0.8.10/php-fcgi
athlon64 2ghz 1gb ram to athlon64 X2 2ghz 2gb ram
mandriva 2008.x/2009.x to 2010.0 (Cooker)
wordpress 2.x.x to 2.8.4
mediawiki 1.x to 1.15.1
bind 9 to powerdns 2.9.22
and a few more that i’ve forgotten about

Upgrade to Mandriva 2008.0

cyprix — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:37:50 +0000

Just a quick note for everyone.

Mandriva Linux 2008.0 is out and going strong. Keeping that in mind, I have now updated this server to run 2008.0 with very few problems (via urpmi –auto-select). This is a first for me with any Mandriva server. Well done guys!

I’ve also installed the Powerpack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410 laptop with no real issues, but with great new fonts and features (like automount ntfs-3g) all around.

Virtual Mail Server Howto

cyprix — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:06:58 +0000

Well, I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted something new, but then again as my regular readers only count in single figures (i.e. me) I don’t think that will be a problem.

I’ve finally finished stage one of my Cyprix Mail Server Howto!

The howto is a very much step-by-step method of setting up a virtual domain, virtual user mail server using:

Postfix
MySQL
Courier-IMAP (and POP3)
RoundCube Webmail (PHP/AJAX)

Currently the howto is based on Mandriva Linux, however with minor changes it can be applied to most Linux/Unix based distributions.

As I mentioned before this system uses virtual domains and users (and aliases) in a MySQL database. Hence it is highly expandable, and can host as many users and different domain names as you wish (well as much as your hardware will allow).

For those who peruse the Mandriva Club Forums, you will have seen this howto appear before, however it has now been updated & tested to work with Mandriva Linux 2007. (see my release candidate review here)

I’m looking for others to increase the scope and functionality of the howto so feel free to register on the wiki and translate the document or add other modules such as spamassasin, clamav etc.

The whole basis of this system is to be highly flexible, and as such I am developing an AJAX/PHP web application for managing this setup. Simply enough it’s called CyprixMail.

If anyone is interested in helping with development of CyprixMail, comment here or send an email to cyprixmail[at]cyprix[dot]com[dot]au. Hopefully the first alpha release will be open to the public soonish. License will be GPLv2.