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 inodes containing multiply claimed blocks)

File /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.20-15-generic/include/config/8139too/8128.h (inode #3387409, mod time Sun Apr 15 06:03:37 2007)
has 1 multiply-claimed block(s), shared with 1 file(s): (inode #7, mod time Thu Oct 4 22:19:56 2007)
Clone multiply-claimed blocks?

I said yes to this and then a few more…..

Quote:
Pass 2 through to Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Free blocks wrong for group #1 (29652, counted=2964
Fix?
Which ends in
Quote:

/dev/hda1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
/dev/hda1: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
/dev/hda1: 188463/4807488 files (1.1% non-contiguous), 4068761/9612886 blocks
root@computer:~#

So I reboot, but then get

Quote:

Could not start the X server due to some internal error.

I was thinking, maybe I will just reinstall – if I can recover my web files (not backed up for a while though). But I tried fsck, and after agreeing to all changes, and rebooting, it worked OK again. Phew.

Why did this occur?
Should we run a disk check on a regular basis?
Can I fix this somehow?
Could the error have been caused by a security breach?

It has been suggested that the problem could have been caused by a disk not being unmounted properly, or a knackered HDD, or a problem with memory. With my old pc, it could be all three. Maybe time for a hardware upgrade.

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 which you define the layout of your page and
where the content should go. After that you can create page description files
in which you only define the content.”

Sounds ideal. I use templates, so this should, with any luck, provide a better way for me to create webpages.

Anyhow, I decided to give webgen a go, but have had a few problems. All which seem to be solvable, even by me. On first attempt at installing it, I received several errors, due to dependencies not being present. These dependencies are:

cmdparse version 2.0.0 or higher – which I think I have…

RedCloth – version 2.0.10 or higher for Textile support (needed for examples and included website templates)

Anyway, I tried to reinstall webgen using the command gem install webgen, but this just highlighted a lack of “gem”. So I followed the instructions on the terminal, and typed “sudo apt-get install rubygems” which set up rubygems version 0.9.0-5. SO, yet another new thing installed on my Linux box, which currently I do not know much about. And I still have not installed webgen.

Next step appears to be “sudo gem install redcloth” which gave the message “Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org” and hung for a while, but then continued to inform me that it had successfully installed RedCloth-3.0.4. However, this did not help.

I decided to go back to the Synaptic Package Manager, and looked up Webgen. On it was the option to install libredcloth-ruby and librmagick-ruby which lead to 4 packages being installed.

But I have more problems. On trying to run webgen, I get this message:

“Markdown not available as content format as BlueCloth could not be loaded: no such file to load — bluecloth: ” The next logical step then was to “sudo gem install bluecloth” which gave the reply “Successfully installed BlueCloth-1.0.0″. Can I run Webgen now? No. More problems, and solutions currently unkwown.

Ah, it appears that maybe cmdparse was missing too. So a quick “sudo gem install cmdparse” gave:
“Successfully installed cmdparse-2.0.2
Installing ri documentation for cmdparse-2.0.2…
Installing RDoc documentation for cmdparse-2.0.2…”
I am not sure whether it was there already though, I have a feeling it was already there.

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 for me, as this means no drivers are required, so the Canon CD can be put aside for good!

To actually upload the photos I have used gThumb (an image viewer and browser for GNOME), which appears to have some rudimentary editing tools too, and an album generator of sorts too. Really I need to look into it further.

So now I can upload my photos from my digital camera onto my Linux machine, and then generate albums using JAlbum, which runs on Java.

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 set up users with home directories, and configure the Apache config files so that they can host websites, including simple static HTML, blogs and even MySQL driven sites. And it is another step towards an alternative career in web design and management, maybe……

One tip for those looking to set up their own FTP, read the tutorials on security, as there are lots of recommended tweaks and additions to the proftpd.conf file to make it more secure, as at less risk of DOS attacks and the such like.

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 command;

gksu nautilus
(which opens the file server in su mode, so that files can be copied over using the GUI. I am still a bit wet behind the ears, and like the good old drag and drop files in Linux). I will learn to do it all through the terminal eventually. One thing at a time.

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 page.htm and then pointed my browser to http://localhost/page.htm and guess what? It worked. One question I have (which you are free to answer, as I am going to bed now, and will probably forget to look it up) is why when pointing the browser to an non-existent page, the message shown is:

Not Found
The requested URL /page2 was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.1 Server at localhost Port 80

With no mention of 404. What is 404? When does it get shown?

I guess that the next steps in my wen hosting and Linux server administration journey would be to “open up” port 80, and somehow point a website to it. Need to sort out DNS, name servers, IP addresses etc. Do I have a static IP address? What else do I need? More to come…. more questions, and hopefully soon more answers.

Keep reading, and soon you too will know exactly how to host your own websites. Well, that assumes that I manage to do so without too many problems!

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 2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1 [340kB]
Get: 6 http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main apache2.2-common 2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1 [930kB]
Get: 7 http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main apache2-mpm-worker 2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1 [432kB]
Get: 8 http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main apache2 2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1 [38.7kB]
Fetched 2311kB in 3s (649kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libapr1.
(Reading database … 105146 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libapr1 (from …/libapr1_1.2.7-8.1_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package libpq5.
Unpacking libpq5 (from …/libpq5_8.2.4-0ubuntu0.7.04_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package libaprutil1.
Unpacking libaprutil1 (from …/libaprutil1_1.2.7+dfsg-2build1_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package libpcre3.
Unpacking libpcre3 (from …/libpcre3_6.7-1ubuntu2_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package apache2-utils.
Unpacking apache2-utils (from …/apache2-utils_2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package apache2.2-common.
Unpacking apache2.2-common (from …/apache2.2-common_2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package apache2-mpm-worker.
Unpacking apache2-mpm-worker (from …/apache2-mpm-worker_2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1_i386.deb) …
Selecting previously deselected package apache2.
Unpacking apache2 (from …/apache2_2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1_all.deb) …
Setting up libapr1 (1.2.7-8.1) …

Setting up libpq5 (8.2.4-0ubuntu0.7.04) …

Setting up libaprutil1 (1.2.7+dfsg-2build1) …

Setting up libpcre3 (6.7-1ubuntu2) …

Setting up apache2-utils (2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1) …
Setting up apache2.2-common (2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1) …
Setting Apache2 to Listen on port 80. If this is not desired, please edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf as desired. Note that the Port directive no longer works.
Module alias installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module autoindex installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module dir installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module env installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module mime installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module negotiation installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module setenvif installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module status installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module auth_basic installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module authz_default installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module authz_user installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module authz_groupfile installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module authn_file installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module authz_host installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

Setting up apache2-mpm-worker (2.2.3-3.2ubuntu0.1) …
* Starting web server (apache2)… apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
[ OK ]