Tag: self-hosting

Server Upgrade | Citadel Install Inside of a Virtual Machine

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Okay! So for now, I’ve landed on Citadel for the email server software that I’m going to use. I’ve bounced around between four different clients (iredmail, Citadel, Ubuntu’s Suite, and Zimbra) and have landed on Citadel because I can install it (lol) and because it suites my needs better. The other software suites are basically wrappers of a bunch of smaller discrete softwares that build up the Ubuntu Suite. This is fine for dedicated servers, but since I’m going to be running this inside of a Virtual Machine, it is more convenient for me to use Citadel.

The install is pretty simple once you get the prerequisites installed and prep the VM itself.

Since it’s a server, a static IP address on the network will be very useful. Setting the IP address of a Virtual Machine is surprisingly simple, or at least it is in my case.

You set the IP you want manually as done here, and to configure the VM you set the network to be attached to a bridged adapter as seen here:

To install citadel, run the following commands per the citadel install guide.

</p>

<pre>apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential curl g++ gettext shared-mime-info libssl-dev
curl http://easyinstall.citadel.org/install | bash</pre>
<p style="text-align: left;">

And the install should go off without a hitch. You can then navigate to yourserverip/mail to access citadel.

Server Upgrade | Stress Testing

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So I wrote a program that makes really big numbers in python in an attempt to break a VM. Here’s the code:

number = 2
count = 0
while 1:
 number = number*number
 count = count + 1
 print str(count) + ' Compounds , ' + str(len(str(number))) + ' Digits'

I left it on for a few days and ended up with this:

Someone try and beat 26 compounds!

Server Upgrade | Understanding and Accessing VM’s

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Eventually, I’d like to migrate this website to the new server that I’m working on now, and to be able to do that I’m probably going to need to be able to use SSH to access the server, access files from it using S/FTP, use some sort of apache webserver etc etc.

Turns out, it is comically easy change the ports on a virtual machine using phpvirtualbox, and I was expecting to have to write a much longer post than this.

 

Server Upgrade | Getting a VM running

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Alright! Time to get VM’s rolling.

I’m going to be running phpvirtualbox on Ubuntu Server 12.04.3. The phpvirtualbox software will work really well because it’s web based and the server is headless.

Basically I’m following these guides:

http://www.howtoforge.com/vboxheadless-running-virtual-machines-with-virtualbox-4.1-on-a-headless-ubuntu-12.04-server

http://www.howtoforge.com/managing-a-headless-virtualbox-installation-with-phpvirtualbox-ubuntu-12.04

https://gist.github.com/dominicsayers/3012172

And doing the following:

Install VirtualBox – note you will most likely need to upgrade

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

Add the line

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian raring contrib non-free

To that file then exit by hitting ^X. Continuing:

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dkms unzip
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.2 --no-install-recommends
wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.12/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.12.vbox-extpack
sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.12.vbox-extpack

Then install phpvirtualbox

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5
sudo service apache2 restart
sudo adduser --ingroup vboxusers vbox
wget 'http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvirtualbox/files/latest/download' -O phpvirtualbox-latest.zip
sudo unzip phpvirtualbox-latest.zip -d /var/www
cd /var/www
sudo mv phpvirtualbox-latest phpvirtualbox
cd phpvirtualbox
sudo mv config.php-example config.php
sudo nano config.php

Edit this file to set $username and $password match the user you created earlier
Also add the following disable phpVirtualbox’s authentication:

var $noAuth = true;

Then ^X to exit. Continue with the installation:

sudo nano /etc/default/virtualbox

Add the line:

VBOXWEB_USER=vbox

Then ^X to exit. Start virtualbox with:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxweb-service start

And then navigate to yourserversip/phpvirtualbox

Then getting a virtalbox VM running inside of that is easy!

Server Upgrade | Pictures!

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Alright so the build works, here are a bunch of pictures!

The final setup!

Server Upgrade | Initial Build Spec

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Hello! Long time no write!

Lemme jump right in, the server that hosts all of my content is dying. Right now, I get around 200 hits a day, and that’s only rising (thanks youtube dudes!) which is really taking a toll on the server. It’s an HP laptop that has been on for almost two years straight, in addition to being my only computer for 4 years before that.

The only reason this is worth writing about is because I intend on using this machine for a few things other than hosing a WordPress server (hopefully I’ll write a post about migrating a content rich blog across servers).

I also want to run a series of email servers on the machine as well! It would appear that a series of virtual machines would be the most efficient way to accomplish this.

Here is a list of the components that I have ordered: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/egg/saved/3deW

Raspberry Pi Media Server | Mounting Hard Drive & Better Minidlna Config

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Please note that this is more for my sake. To mount a hard drive in raspbian do the following: Make sure you have ntfs-3g installed by running:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Then mount the drive read/write with the following command:

sudo mkdir /media/USBHDD
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1/ /media/USBHDD/

And it shout be mounted. /dev/sda1 is the location of your hard drive. Now to configuring minidlna. Location of minidlna.conf file and access command:

sudo vi /etc/minidlna.conf

This is the file I’m running right now. As I type this i’m successfully streaming to my Kindle Fire HD (the reason why I’ve decided to really make this thing work) but I’m not sure if it’s stable. It’s also able to stream to VLC as of now.

Raspberry Pi Media Server | Moving Backwards to go Forwards

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It’s time to face facts, minidlna and XBMC won’t run at the same time in Raspbmc. The basic UPNP included in Raspbmc won’t work consistently and Raspmc and is not nearly as stable as minidlna. OpenELEC is fast enough, but does not have the expandability of a full linux OS. I need to restart this project.

 

First thing’s first I’m going to straight up speed this thing up as much as I can. At the base level, this begins with the SD card. I’m going to go from a junk 4gb standard speed SD card to a 8gb SanDisk Ultra 30mb/s SDHC. On this I’m going to install the latest version of Raspian and overclock it to the maximum 1GHz.

 

I’ll keep you posted on how I progress.

Raspberry Pi Media Server | Speeding Up Raspberry Pi [Documentation]

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So although I haven’t written about it yet, right now I’ve gotten a Raspbmc Server up and running along with Minidlna. It works great for about an hour at a time and then it really bogs down. This seems to be caused by a combination of Raspbmc and the hard drive spinning down. My solution is to try OpenELEC, overclock the Raspberry Pi, and change out the SD card for one with a faster read/write speed.

Encoding A LOT of video in linux | [Documentation]

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For my Raspberry Pi Media Server to be able to stream to mobile (a topic I haven’t yet covered here) I need to convert ALL of the video in my family’s 700+ file, 400+ gb, media collection to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. I recently acquired a hard drive to consolidate and store all of this hard drive on. For the past week or so I’ve been making some progress in converting the video. On my windows tower I’ve been using the program Format Factory to convert the video. I’m running into a few problems with this. For one, my windows computer is my main machine, and multithread converting really bottlenecks it. It also takes a long time – having to watch it while it does it’s thing waiting for it to convert instead of just going to the next set of files is annoying. I could just convert

So I’ve decided to get back into python and write a program that will perfect the conversion process. Like in my PiScanner project, I’ll be using an existing program within python and my code will automate the process.

Goals are as follows:

1. Convert the video

2. Make sets of folders for the video

3. Have it all done on the external HDD

4. Have it be more “efficient” than the setup I’m running now. I.E be able to be on all the time – which shouldn’t be a problem as the server you’re viewing this website on is on all time time and I can just run the script here.

5. Make the end program useable for anyone.