GCW moves to a new box

If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the … Continue reading “GCW moves to a new box”

If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the G5 at everything I’ve thrown at it. I suspect that’s being helped by the increased RAM in the Mini — 4Gig, up from 1.5 in the G5.

I’m also running Snow Leopard now, which meant that once again I had to go through the dance of getting the AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) configured properly. Highlights for 10.6 include:

  • I installed the latest x86_64 version of MySQL. For my traffic level, I doubt that will make a significant performance difference, but you never know.
  • The PHP that comes with SL is actually current and includes the PDO drivers for MySQL. That’s great because it’s one less thing to install/configure versus previous upgrades, but there is still some work to do:
    • edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to uncomment the LoadModule for php5_module
    • copy the /etc/php.ini.default file to /etc/php.ini, then edit php.ini and modify (at least) the lines that contain “default_socket” to point at /tmp/mysql.sock, and lines that contain “default_port” to 3306.
  • At this point, php and mysql both worked (as evinced by the fact that phpmyadmin would run, and tell me useful stuff), but the blogs were still failing. It turns out that everyone (i.e. php and mysql), were now finally agreeing that I needed to use the “new” password format, so with a touch of…

    SET PASSWORD FOR 'wpuser'@'%' =
    PASSWORD('not really my password');

    …we were good to go.

Of course, I still have all the other sites to work through. Sheep’s Ahoy is fine. Both the wiki(s) and the gallery seem to be working, but the genealogy site is completely busted. Unfortunately, that’s going to take more effort to get going again, since it has several dependencies on php4. I may have to rethink that one; one possibility is just to suck the content out of it, and then switch to a Mac based genealogy program that can publish to the web. The good news is that the G5 box is still around, so that can wait until I have some free time.

Anyway, let me know if you see anything weird happening.