Ubuntu Server Problems

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As many people know, from my postings on twitter recently I have been having an issue getting my web server setup with linux, more specifically trac and svn under linux. For the past year I have had the same server running Windows 2000 and Apache as my trac/svn and testing server and I needed to get everything on linux, but I’ve had more problems than I originally thought I would have to deal with.

In the past three days, I think I’ve spent more time working in the linux command line than all the other times combined. It has been my goal for awhile to get my servers all running linux here too, but big problem was always Trac and SVN. I knew it would be a pain, but since I was on spring break this week I decided that this was the time to do it.

Setting up a LAMP server is no big deal, I’ve done it several times. I’m at the point where I can fly through the intsall in no time. The big problem I had was getting trac and svn setup and then moved over with everything intact.

On Friday night, after some searching Google for tutorials on moving Trac and SVN, I found Subversion + Trac for Multiple Projects (One Click Build) by Anant Garg. This really saved me. It was a great tutorial that went through every step line by line. It might have taken me a couple of times to figure it out, but eventually I got the whole thing setup and moved over to a virtual machine. This was my backup. I knew once I had the virtual machine setup and everything was working that I’d be able to get it moved back to the web server once I had linux on it.

This is where the real problems started. I’ve never had as many problems getting an operating system installed in my life. At first it wouldn’t even go to the installer. It kept dropping back to BusyBox (I think it’s a lack of RAM). Eventually, after about 25 tries, I got it to go through the installer. When it restarted it went back to BusyBox. The stuff I read online about getting past BusyBox didn’t work, I couldn’t even install the alternate version of Ubuntu. I finally gave up last night at 11:30 and walked away. This morning when I went to retrieve my keyboard I noticed that it was still looping through the BusyBox cycle. I typed ‘exit’, and it quit BusyBox and booted into the OS. I couldn’t beleive it. After all that all I had to do was type ‘exit’. I later found out that you have to wait for 3 or 4 minutes after it boots up to quit BusyBox (again, I think more RAM would fix the problem).

Once I got the server all setup and running, I had a small problem moving everything back over, but once I figured out that I had to change a path in one of the configuration files I was up and running.

This install is even more usefull than the previous one. I’m really liking it.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

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I just installed the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin on WordPress. It lets me place code inside posts in many different languages like the examples below.

[php]
echo "Josh is cool"; //that’s me!

function joshiscool() {
return "Josh is Cool";
}

echo joshiscool();
[/php]

[shell light=”true”]

sudo apt-get install apache2

[/shell]

Available languages are:

  • Bash
  • C#
  • C++
  • CSS
  • Delphi
  • Diff
  • Groovy
  • JavaScript
  • Java
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • Plain Text
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Scala
  • SQL
  • Visual Basic
  • XML

Twitterfeed + Ping.fm + Facebook

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I just setup another twitterfeed of the blog to get posted to under “blogs” to ping.fm. It will go to my wordpress.com site as well as a few other things, but what I really wanted to set it up for was Facebook. I turned ping.fm off for facebook last week, but I still want new blog posts to update the status there. So hopefully this ends up working.

Website Updates

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I decided it was time to fix some stuff that’s been bugging me for awhile today and check some stuff off the list. So here’s some of the stuff I checked off:

  • Added a plugin to support mobile devices (iphone, ipod touch, g1, etc.)
  • Got an actual twitter badge instead of using the RSS feed. It doesn’t work in safari though. Hopefully it’s just Safari 4 Beta.
  • Cleaned up the blogroll. Sorry if I got rid of your name. The list was getting too long.
  • Organized the tags on the archives page by size
  • Added an about section to the sidebar on joshbetz.net and updated the About page on that site

That’s about all. There were a few things that were even smaller.

Update: One more thing worth mentioning was the contact page. I put a new email address on the contact page for another way to get in touch with me.

Update 2: I also added a plugin that looks for tweets with links to the site and puts them in the comments. I had to add my name to the black list on that one because it was getting the tinyurl links from the automatic tweets I have on a new post.