Category Archives: Wordpress

WordPress back up!

Exactly two years ago, a lightning strike destroyed my ADSL Converter. I had to emergency switch to my FritzBox and it has remained like that ever since. I decided to clean up the rack and re-cable it. I removed everything, and well, suddenly the little one was there and everything lay just there for ages.

I think about a year ago, I modified my Cisco SG300-28P with more silent Noctua fans, and while that was successful, it really is something I’m not going to do ever again. Besides, turns out it’s mostly the house ventilation that makes the most noise.

Recently I did a minimum of re-cabling, and cleaned the rack up and now I could get back to running my servers again. I’m not there yet, but I used my Shuttle NC02U to get at least my WordPress site up and running with the data I exported from the Dell R210 II. Eventually, everything will be moved back to a virtual machine on the Dell, but for now this will do.

I fought some Latin1 to UTF8 conversion issues with that WordPress export, and decided to delete a few older articles that I didn’t think were worth keeping. I do find that I have a tendency to make articles way too long. I should impose a word limit on myself.

Is it worth running a WordPress in a Facebook and Twitter dominated world? Yes, I think so. It’s probably not for everyone, but at least it gives me back some control over my data.

First post

My wife asked me to get her a blog.  Obviously, I could simply have pointed her to wordpress.com or blogger.com, but what’s the fun in that, right?  I have lang.lu, so why not simply give her a wordpress under nathalie.lang.lu, right?  That should look “cool” to even the least technical person out there, right?

Infrastructure?  I have infrastructure.  I made lang.lu use my DNS servers.  Then I simply created another Xen DomU on my lab server and installed wordpress and mysql-server from the repositories.  I have to admit, that setting it up is really easy, once you actually understand what goes where.  Next time, I swear, it will only take the promised 5 minutes.

The main complication was that all my infrastructure is behind an OpenBSD server.  I usually don’t run apache/php or any other cgi-based stuff on that machine, because I’m slighty paranoid.  Well, after looking into Apache reverse proxies, I had my solution right there.  Of course, you need to adapt your wordpress for that, by setting bothe WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to the effective url, you’ll be using.  I really don’t understand why these package can’t simply keep all generated url relative.  Is that so hard to do?

Well, it seems to work now.  Well, it wasn’t really planned, but there you go: I have a “blog”.  Ain’t I hip?