So you need to install a search engine on your site. Keeping with my open source solutions, I have decided to go with ht://Dig. As soon as Apple decided to go with UNIX as a back end to their OS, I was excited because I could finally use ht://Dig (and another classic program called Mailman) I will always be grateful to both communities (ht://Dig and Mailman) because I learned so much about compiling and not to be afraid of source files. I have used ht://Dig for a few years with minimal complaints. You will need to compile ht://Dig, so make sure you have Apple’s Development Package (Xcode).

No need to re-create the wheel, so to compile/install ht://Dig, follow these directions. Before you actually compile everything, you will need to apply a patch that came out since the instructions were made. download the patch: ftp://ftp.ccsf.org/htdig-patches/3.1.6/htnotifyNull.0 and change the actual ntnotify source file with the corrected variables. After you have applied the patch, you can then complile the source while following the directions from the link above.

To customize the result pages, you can edit the html … [more]

What a morning. Surprise surprise…I decided to install Mac OS X Server on my PowerBook to play around with the Apache conf (since I legally own two copies that just sit in my drawer). Ever since Mac OS X Server 1.0 came out I was excited to use Mac OS X Server. I loved AppleShare IP, and was ready to learn something new. Yeah, you are right, how many times can I tell this story?

To the point: you have web sites that need to be hosted in a Mac environment…what do you do? Two options (not including Darwin): Mac OS X Client, Mac OS X Client. I took my standard Mac OS X Client conf file and went line by line to see how the conf file was modified for Mac OS X Server. I will give credit to Apple for cleaning up the conf from 10.2 to 10.3, but man, it still leaves a lot of room for improvement. First of all….let me break down the conf files that Mac OS X Server uses.
httpd.conf - The main configuration file that should contain all the basics. I have not figured … [more]

If you did not notice, I have a thing for wierd and often funny Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server error messages. I periodically update the image on the right hand side that is a screen shot of an error I have received. Keep looking for new and exciting errors.

PS. The “You cannot continue to log in at this time” error was produced upon startup, as the log in dialog box popped up in the background. Fun!

If you have mission critical servers, you know that a backup is essential. I do not want my mission critical web server to go down. Along comes rsync.

How to set up rsync to synch my boot drive (and make it bootable) as well as synch my data files (html/php files):
First, you will to set up passwordless ssh between your servers. This is a good tutorial, except make sure step #5 is actually: /var/root/.ssh/cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys2 . Now you are ready to send data from your main server to the backup(s).

Data
I have a daily cron job to run my data rsync script.
The script is: time sudo rsync -a -vv -z -e ssh “/Volumes/www” “root@10.0.0.1:/Volumes”.
(where /Volumes/www is the location of all my data files and 10.0.0.1 is the IP of my backup web server)

Boot drive (that is bootable)
I have a weekly (I chose weekly because if I apply an update to something that proves not to work, I know I have some flexibility) (and yes I always apply updates to a test server first) cron job to run my boot script.
The script is:time sudo rsync -a –exclude /dev/* –exclude /afs/* … [more]

I was recently asked to defend my decision to run OS X Client on my Xserve and I thought others might like to know why as well.

Changing the IP. I have written about this before. I have a mission critical web server. I want to upgrade the OS or the hardware, so for maximum up time, I configure my new server with a temporary IP, then when everything is ready and tested, I shutdown the mission critical server, change the IP on the new server, and everything and everyone is happy. Less than a minute of downtime. I am sure OS X Server is nice for people who do not have mission critical servers, but look in the mac-osx-server listserv archives, and you will see changing the IP is not as easy as Apple would like to think. (No, not even the changeip command works correctly. How am I supposed to upgrade any hardware or software when I need to test it first before I put it in production when I cannot use a temporary IP? I have tried changing the IP in Mac OS X Server 10, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 … [more]

So you have a web server and one/some domain names. You want to have all requests to domain.com to go to www.domain.com. most companies have this redirect in place (Apple is an example). I was stumped when I first set out to do this...so here is what I learned from our friends on the Apache mailing list.

< virtualhost *:80 >
ServerName www.domain.com
ServerAlias domain.com
Redirect permanent / http://www.domain.com/
< /virtualhost >

< virtualhost *:80 >
ServerName www.domain.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@domain.com
DocumentRoot /Volumes/www/domain.com/documents
< /virtualhost >

This set up in Apache will then redirect all domain.com requests to www.domain.com.
You cannot beat mailing lists' support!
[tags]apache, vhosts, redirect[/tags]

It is time to build another web server, and this time I will write about what is on it. I have built this configuration on the original iMac all the way up to the latest Xserve with success, so it is possible to make a cheap web server out of an older computer. To further save money, you could use all the apps with a different OS like FreeBSD, Darwin, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc (I like the BSDs) which are free.

OS: Mac OS X
Web Server: Apache
Web Server Benchmarking: Siege
Web Authentication Apache Module: mod_auth_mysql
Database: MySQL
Database Management Software: phpMyAdmin
Scripting Language: PHP
Search Engine: ht://Dig
Web Calendar: phpiCalendar
Tasks Management Software: (to keep track of all this) Tasks
WebMail: Squirrelmail
News: phpNews
Blogging: WordPress