First I would like to thank everybody who sent emails and posted comments on possible errors and omissions in the documentation. Special thanks go to Tim who ran into some issues because of the errors in the documentation and while helping him trying to solve the problems he had, I made corrrections to the documentation. (more…)
As one of the prerequisites for the ISP in a box documents for your Mac mini is having a fixed IP-address. This enables you to connect your domain name to your ip-address using DNS. There are some possibilities documented in using a dynamic ip address but I now found this article that explains how you can have a domain name attached to a dynamic ip-address without to much trouble. I don’t know how it will work as I have the luxury of a fixed ip address for my server. If someone with a dynamic ip address would let me know how this works out for them and if you can add MX records as well for use with a mail server.
As Urs noted in his comment, it is possible to use MX records (you need them to be able to receive e-mail) with www.dyndns.com.
At first I thought that I just needed to install
MySQL on my new Mac mini to get the complete stack for building PHP/MySQL based websites as is this one. But somehow it didn’t just fit together as expected so I started to look around the internet for other sources which might solve my issues now and in the future.
I found 3 sources which were referenced by many others:
After looking around at all three websites the one I liked the most was Server Logistics. Basically I choose them because of the fact they run all their own servers with the package they provide as a download. You could install all the packages seperatly (MAMP has one package) which is helpfull if one item in the stack gets an update. Installing the packages from Server Logistics was as easy as downloading, clicking and installing. No configuration issues or other issues, they even came with Preferences Panels.
I’ve got it running for a couple of days now and it’s running smoothly ever since. I’m migrating all my sites to the Mac mini to see if I run into any problems. If that’s finished and everything keeps working then the next stop will be the firewall and mailserver.
While I was looking around on my disk where to change the default Apache configuration after I found out that it is installed per default on OSX and I just needed to activate it in the System Preferences / Sharing panel. Click on Personal Web Sharing and you’re off.
More information on how this works and how to configure Apache can be found here. That is not what this blog entry was about.
Looking for the httpd.conf file where you configure your Apache webserver I found 2 entries in the filesystem. One was in /etc/httpd/ where you’d expect it as a regular Linux/Unix user but there is also one to be found in /private/etc/httpd/. So which was I to use ?
After some Googling and looking closer at the directory entries, I found out that /etc is a symbolic link to /private/etc and therefore the same directory. So actually there is only one httpd.conf that is used.
It seems that this has been done to provide compatibility between the unix roots and the OSX’s own layout of the filesystem which has its origin in NeXT.