This morning my Ubuntu OS was running really slowly, and eventually Firefox become unresponsive. I was forced to hit the power switch to reboot, but the reboot failed, due to a “bad block” and duplicates. All a bit worrying. This morning I could get nothing to work, and the instructions onscreen were a bit of a read herring, telling me that it could not find apt, and that I needed to “apt-get install apt” to fix the problem. Actually the problem started when Ubuntu did a forced disk check, as one had not been done for 180 days. But the check failed (this is copied from the screen, may have some errors): Check failed: Duplicate of bad block in use! So I then did fsck which gave this: Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks and sizes Quote: Running additional passes to resolve blocks claimed by more than one inode…. Pass 1B: Rescanning… Multiply-claimed blocks in inode 7: 8 16 73 Multiply-claimed blocks in inode 3387409: 73 Multiply-claimed blocks in inode 3452049: 1 Multiply-claimed blocks in inode 3452051: 8 Multiply-claimed blocks in inode 3452052: 16 Pass 1C: Scanning directories for indoes with multiply-claimed blocks Pass 1D: Reconciling multiply-claimed blocks (There are 4 [...]

While browsing through the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu, I spotted a web building application called webgen, which is a static website generator. When I first started looking into building websites, I assumed that such a package would be standard, but only now have I found something that seems to be what I have been looking for. I use Google’s Blogger for created websites / blogs, but I always feel slightly limited by the fact that my files are generate on Google’s servers, and uploaded to my own. This generally means that it takes longer to generate files than it should, but more importantly, I lose control of the process. If Google takes its servers down for maintainence, I cannot post my blogs, or edit and upload pages. I always thought that Google should offer a downloadable Blogger application so that users can generate their blogs on their own computers. I would have thought that this would save a lot of resources for Google, but as yet they appear not to be going down this route. Webgen is simply described as: “Webgen is used to generate web pages from page description and template files. You create one template file in [...]

As I use JAlbum to generate web albums, I need to install it onto my Linux machine. To do so I had to upgrade my Java Virtual Machine to Sun’s latest version. I decided to use the Synaptic Package Manager for this, as I was not entirely sure which packages I needed to install. With a quick search on Synaptic I quickly found the latest Sun Java files and installed them. After this Jalbum installed perfectly. My next task was to upload photos from my Canon EOS 20d camera to Ubuntu. The Canon software that comes with the camera does a fine job on Windows, but this was no use to me. First of all, Ubuntu did not recognise my Camera at all. A quick search revealed that I needed to change the camera’s communication setting from normal to PTP. I had never even heard of PTP before today. It stands for Picture Transfer Protocol (seems obvious now). According to Wikipedia Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) is a widely supported protocol developed by the International Imaging Industry Association to allow the transfer of images from digital cameras to computers and other peripheral devices without the need of additional device drivers. Perfect [...]

I have almost got my server set up. Today I managed to get the FTP server set up, using ProFTPD. Installing it was a breeze with Linux, as usual, but configuring it was much trickier for me. More steep learning curves. I have managed to set up users with FTP access to their home directories, and as a result I have had to move some sites from /var/www/domains to /home/user/domains. Once moving the directories over I have permission problems, ownership problems and access problems. A bit of chown-ing, chmod-ding and several resetarts later, it was all working. I was mostly getting 550 errors on uploading directories. Following several useful tutorials and doing some serious Googling got me sorted though. Too tired to go into details for this one, but ensuring that the user has full ownership of all directories and it is CHMOD 755 seemed to the the trick. Pretty obvious, but in the process of moving a web directory things got really messed up. Also haveing virtual hosts set up required an additional field in the proftpd.conf file. The good news is that this means is that I can now confidently host sites for my family, as I can [...]

Got lots of help and advice this evening from my mate who is a bit of a wizard with computers. This evening I learnt these handy commands: (find . -type f -name ‘*.htm*’); do (to find all files within a directory that end in .htm or .hmtl or .htmanything) tar cvzf ~/mybackup.tar . (to back up the current directory to the home directory. cvzf stands for c: create archive, v: verbose, z: use compression, f: use the following filename) ls ~/mybackup.tar (to list the contents of the backup) mv ~/mybackup.tar ~/websites.20070926.tgz (to move the backup into a directory dated today) mkdir ~/websitebackups (to make a new directory in the home directory) mv ~/*tgz ~/*backups (to move all directories ending in tgz to the directory ending in backups – in this case, moving the one file we created earlier) The purpose of all this was to prepare to change the URLs inside all of my web files from absolute to relative. Still not done that part yet. Oh, I have got as far as changing the permissions across all directories in /var/www/ also, which was simply done by sudo chmod 755 -R * Piece of cake. One last thing was the [...]

Well, everything seems to be going exceptionally smoothly so far. Time for bed now, but next time I will be installing MySQL. Then once that is set up I should in theory have a test environment to test database driven websites such as Drupal and WordPress. And this will help me on my journey to become a web designer, or as decided today, a web solutions manager. Personally, I feel that hacker is still more apt for my skills. But they are getting there. Although I am not entirely sure what I have learnt this evening, other than with Ubuntu / Linux it is very easy to install Apache and PHP. Hopefully I will have time to install MySQL tomorrow night. For now, I want to quickly check that I can view a simple static html page on my Apache web server…… Excellent, it worked. In the terminal I typed sudo gedit /var/www/index.html which opened the text editor. I copied the source code of the index page of my Tranquillizer website, saved, then pointed my browser at http://localhost/ and the page is there, in all its glory. Just to be sure (I am like that) I created a page called [...]

OK, this post will seem very strange to most readers. I am in the process of installing Apache onto my Ubuntu distribution, and I want to record everything that happens. So I am simply copying to this blog the terminal output. To most people this will seem like a crazy thing to do, but if I have a problem, then I already have a copy of everything that happened, and can hopefully get some advice! It is also a learning process for me. So here goes. jon@jon-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install apache2 Password: Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following extra packages will be installed: apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapr1 libaprutil1 libpcre3 libpq5 The following NEW packages will be installed apache2 apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapr1 libaprutil1 libpcre3 libpq5 0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 2311kB of archives. After unpacking 6443kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/main libapr1 1.2.7-8.1 [109kB] Get: 2 http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main libpq5 8.2.4-0ubuntu0.7.04 [223kB] Get: 3 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/main libaprutil1 1.2.7+dfsg-2build1 [70.2kB] Get: 4 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/main libpcre3 6.7-1ubuntu2 [167kB] Get: 5 http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main apache2-utils [...]