Brian's Tech Blog

It was pointed out that my last post was not complete. Things worked, but as soon as you ran the test cases (admittedly, I don't do that very often) things break.

To solve the problem, I found a great page on the rubyonrails.org wiki here

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One of the projects I needed to do was to create an image gallery that allowed users to login using their existing phpBB login/password. Doing it with RoR is fairly simple.

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I needed to add briansblog.net to an existing qmail setup. It was actually pretty easy once I figured out how.

• Add the domain to the files /var/qmail/control/locals and /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts
• If you have a local user existing, just put an email address you want to forward to into a .qmail file in that users home directory
• To catch everything, put an email address in a file called .qmail-default in /var/qmail/alias

Thats all there is to it. Took me an hour to dig around huge howto's and FAQ's to find this one snippet of information.

Working on another project, which is in Ruby on Rails. RoR typically uses Mongrel to serve up the pages, and while there are tons of pages on how to get RoR and Fastcgi working together I have never been able to do this.

The solution I have used is having Apache as a frontend, proxying to a Mongrel server running on the same machine. This is not the fastest way, and with Mongrel being fairly single threaded, you would have to run Mongrel cluster to get decent performance. This is intended for the first pass of hosting, just to get things rolling.

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When I set up this blog, I already had a webserver running serving another domain. It was rather crude httpd.conf setup as managing Apache is not my specialty.

I wanted this domain to work, and to work well. I enlisted the help of a coworker to guide me. What I wanted to do was to make sure that no matter what someone typed in, you ended up at briansblog.net

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I have never used a real blog software other than livejournal before. I was pointed to b2evolution by a friend, and so far I like it.

Downloading and installing was very simple. I already had MySql and Apache 2.2 installed on the machine. Installation was as easy as downloading the zip, unpack it into a directory, run install script. Done.

After installing it there was a myriad of options to change, a handful of skins installed, and a few example posts. I haven't yet mastered all the controls but as you can see I can at least do the basics.

Welcome to Brian's Blog.

A little bit about me: I work in Silicon Valley, Cupertino to be specific. I currently work with Ruby on Rails, J2ME, J2EE, with XML and XForms thrown in as well. I also have experience with a few build tools. ANT, Maven, and Hudson primarily.

The whole point of this blog is to record interesting problems I run into, and the solution that I ended up with. Previously I haven't had the urge to do this, but then again I wasn't working with RoR befor either!