Switching…

Well, it’s the end of the day here and I need to get this of my heart. I’ve become 40 today which got me a bit depressed for the last week. 40 means that you are becoming an old man. While I still feel like in my 20′s although my body is protesting a lot more than before and doesn’t always agree with me.

The last few years life has been good to me on a personal level, my relationship is blooming, I’ve become a father and I feel more alive than ever.

Well it’s said that it becomes easier if you pass 40, the getting older, I hope they are right because currently I don’t feel 40 but I still have to tell everybody that I am and currently it s#cks.

It’s official, the new site DIYMacServer.com is open for business. I couldn’t wait any longer even though it is not finished yet. The site is still building up on content, as I’m rewriting most of the stuff and incorporating some changes on how things are written. I’m still tweaking the site and some of the look and feel, so don’t look strange if something might look a bit different the next time you visit.

The new site comes with a new forum, using BBPress, which is from the makers of WordPress. It has some nice features which I think will make the information more accessible like tags. Tags make it easier to find posts that span more than one Category. Another feature that will help me and that is the Akismet anti-spam feature. It saves me a lot of time not to have to delete all the spam users from the forum everyday. Akismet saves this blog from more than 100 spam comments each day. (I don’t even get that many via email).

Please note that all updates, blog posts and such concerning the old “ISP in a box” (from now on called DIYMacServer) documentation will no longer be put onto this blog. If you have an RSS reader please subscribe to the new site for all news on updates and changes for the DIYMacServer stuff.

Just wanted to see if there are any objections to move the Apache and PHP installations from their current location in ‘/Library/’ to ‘/usr/local/’

The layout for Apache will become:

<layout DIYMacServer>
    prefix:        /usr/local/apache2
    exec_prefix:   ${prefix}
    bindir:        ${exec_prefix}/bin
    sbindir:       ${exec_prefix}/bin
    libdir:        ${exec_prefix}/lib
    libexecdir:    ${exec_prefix}/modules
    mandir:        ${prefix}/man
    sysconfdir:    /etc/httpd/
    datadir:       /var/www
    installbuilddir: ${datadir}/build
    errordir:      ${datadir}/error
    iconsdir:      ${datadir}/icons
    htdocsdir:     ${datadir}/htdocs
    manualdir:     ${datadir}/manual
    cgidir:        ${datadir}/cgi-bin
    includedir:    ${prefix}/include
    localstatedir: /var
    runtimedir:    ${localstatedir}/run
    logfiledir:    ${localstatedir}/log/httpd
    proxycachedir: ${localstatedir}/cache/httpd
</Layout>

This brings everything in-line with normal other installs. The configuration is as it was with the original Apache in ‘/etc/httpd‘ and the log, cache and pid file are all in ‘/var‘. Although I’m still having doubts about the datadir, I would have put it in ‘/var/www/‘ but on the normal OS X install it would be in ‘/Library/WebServer/‘. What do you think ?

PHP5 will be located in ‘/usr/local/php5‘, the php.ini file will be located in ‘/etc‘.

I hope to open up the new site tomorrow if all goes well…

It’s time again for a rewrite/overhaul of the documentation to include all the remarks I’ve gotten over the past time which weren’t really serious errors or omissions but would make the documentation a bit better to use. If you have any remarks on improving the documentation, please leave a comment

This rewrite also coincides with another decision I made. After all the comments I received over the time I had this site up about the name “ISP in a box” I’ve been trying to think of a new one. Some of you helped me at my last plea to provide some input the creative process. After some sleepless nights I cut the Gordian Knot and made a decision. I looked if the domain name was still available and registered it.

DIYMacServer.com

The page you currently see is a place-holder, but in the backgound I’m busy hacking together a new WordPress based site, with new forum software which has some advantages over the current forum. I’ve finished a simple consistent design (not very web 2.0 or very pretty, but I’m not a designer) and as soon as I got some content to show I’ll open up the site and migrate the current forum entries over to the new one.

I’ll guess I need to organize a design competion for the look and feel and perhaps get a nice logo to go with it. All I can offer is a small price and everlasting fame, maybe someone is up for sponsoring ? As this is strictly a hobby project funded by your generous donations I don’t want to spend much of that on a design. If you want to help out or have some ideas on how to tackle this please let me know.

MySQL has released a new version of the Community Server 5.0.33. This is a source-only release, which means that MySQL.com will not provide binary builds. You can read all about the new/changed functionality and bugfixes in the release notes. You can download the latest source version from the MySQL.com site.

Because of the new Community release policy, there will be source only releases between the full (binary) releases. I was unable to find out what the reason for it was or when a version qualifies for a binary release.

You can download the binary install of a previous version and do the source compile/install to get a functional 5.0.33 version running with all the goodies and defaults from the binary install (like a startupitem and preference pane).

The boys and girls working on WordPress have made some serious new years resolutions by pumping out these new versions every couple of weeks. 2.1 is a big step in improvements and new features which will make future development, plugins, themes and widgets a lot easier.

The new release is called “Ella” after the famous jazz-singer. You can read more about the release in the wordpress dev log, Dougal’s weblog and this one.

I’ve upgraded again and it went without a problem, well almost. I got a warning when upgrading. I usually restrict database users to what I think they need and try to keep that to a minimum. My wordpress database user was not allowed to drop tables, never thought that was going to happen. The upgrade script was unable to drop the table “wp_linkcategories” now it is no longer needed. So I have done that manually.

Boy did I miss out on a important update. I forgot this email during the holidays and only noted the upgrade on Roundcube because there was a patch released this week which solves a bug with parsing HTML messages which got introduced in the last security update for 0.1-beta2.

The security update for December is an important one if you haven’t upgraded or installed since then you are advised to do so. My apologies for bringing you this news a bit too late, I’ll try to be more alert in the future.

January is going to be a busy month with all these updates, just letting you know that the Courier-auth library got updated with a small bug fix that has no affect on us. It is a fix concerning anonymous LDAP binds and we don’t use LDAP in our setup. But it will explain why you will a see a new version when you go and download it. I’ve tested it myself and there are no changes to the workings in our setup.

This is a very quick release after the previous one but that was because some bugs sneaked past and there are some scurity patches included in this release. Read all about it on the WordPress development blog. Off course I upgraded my blog asap and didn’t have any problems… yet

Whilst I personally haven’t seen any false positives, some of the people who use my setup have seen them (only a few) and they needed help. So I updated the training script I provide to include the retraining of false positives. One of the Forum users “bohica”, aka Tim, already made a script himself which he posted on the forum. But it missed out on make sure the email being fed for retraining was indeed tagged as Spam by DSPAM. It’s no use feeding correct negatives als false positives.

There are two variables added to the script to indicate which folder the false positives are located and if they should be deleted afterwards. Read the documentation on the script before you use it ! You can download the script from there as well.