The Year of the Geek

Thursday night my roommate and I decided to buy new hard drives for our Mac’s. I was running very low on my 100GB drive, and he wanted something better than his 160GB 5400RPM drive. I was looking into upgrading for a few weeks by now and was very tempted to buy this 320 GB Western Digital Scorpio that runs at 7200RPM. This is the same one that my boss, Carl, purchased for his MBP. The major difference is that he bought it from iFixit.com for $199.

I use one of the best programs for a Mac to backup your hard drive simply and cleanly, Carbon Copy Cloner, and best of all, it’s 100% free. The backup takes roughly 2 hours using an external drive interface via USB, and I begin the dissection.

I’ve installed and replaced several parts in Powerbooks before but not a MBP. It’s relatively the same,, with the exception of a few screws and innards. I like using the How-To’s on iFixit.com, they have everything from drive replacement to replacing the screen for Mac laptops old and new. I use the one suitable for my laptop of course, and in the end takes about 45 minutes or so to replace.

Almost 3 hours to backup and install a new 320GB hard drive into my laptop, not too shabby I think. Of course my roommate was done in about 2 hours because it is a lot easier to get to the hard drive on the new MacBooks, but that’s how it works.

The Good:

• Very easy to backup drive, CCC is very quick and safe
• No BIOS settings, plug the drive in, you’re done
• Fairly easy to get to drive once case is opened

The Bad:

• Too many screws to open MBP
• Apple uses some TORX screws to secure case and drive

The Verdict:

• Noticeable increase in speed with new drive (16mb cache)
• VERY quiet drive
• No vibrations (some people online complained about vibrations from the new drive)
• Well worth the $100
• Stay away from iFixit for hard drives;-)

So, very odd things are happening. First, our DNS server is not taking updates for some reason, unless Poly isn’t sending updates for some reason. Either way, on my network, the site does not work, on any other network, it’s fine now. Second, the site that was originally setup was not working of course, but I decided to do some trickery. I wanted to see if the system was actually working properly, or if it was actually the WordPress install. I switched the working virtual host home directory with the Word Press one, and lo-and-behold, it didn’t work. I just uploaded a fresh WordPress install to the proper directory, and it’s now a working site!

Turns out it was NOT Leopard server, but the WordPress configuration. So let this be a lesson, always start fresh if you can.

As I wrote before, I use Apple servers at work and most times I enjoy using them. I feel that the operating system is very stable (I happen to use 10.4.1 and 10.5.5) and very customizable, and i also feel that the hardware is very good. It’s very rare that I see the CPUs being pegged or the memory getting drained somehow.

Our secondary server, POW, the server that this site is currently hosted on hosts a few different domains. Recently, I have been setting up things for our new HCI and Games lab here at BXMC. They wanted a site so they made one in WordPress with my recommendation. Now I need to move it to the server with a better domain than pow.idmi.poly.edu/~chrisdimauro/wordpress. I was instructed to use socialgamelab.bxmc.poly.edu (the bxmc is due to the expected change in all of our domains soon). I call up my guy at IS and he tells me it’s done. Excellent for me.

Now the task of setting up another virtual host on POW. Normally this is a CLI job with lots of files and configuration but not with Server Admin (SA); SA gives you a really nice GUI for editing many server features. One can completely configure and maintain their server without ever using CLI by using SA. More complex set-ups will have difficulty at times while only using SA.

This is what you’re presented with after opening SA, a very nice looking summary of your server and it’s running processes.

Now, I want to add a new website to this server using a name-based virtual host. So I’ll select ‘Web’ from the left side list of active services, and begin to edit this:

That’s a very simple, straight-forward form for a website. I filled out all of the appropriate information, pointed everything to the proper directory, and save. I restart apache, and try the site after a few (i needed to wait for it to replicate to the external dns servers). After a short wait, I test the site. I am directed to the main site, pow.idmi.poly.edu. Something is not working on my end, I don’t think virtual hosting is working properly. So I test one of our other virtual hosts on the server, and that works. I compare the two, both are the same 100%. Now it’s time to bring out the CLI and go deeper into the config files.

Apparently Leopard server uses different configuration for virtual hosts and apache in general. It breaks up each virtual host config file into numbered .conf files. Apache’s httpd.conf just includes the directory and any .conf files that are inside of that directory. Sure, this looks nice, it’s pretty clean and easy to edit sites, but it’s a pain when researching help, I am literally stuck with Apple only help (to a good extent). I find the appropriate file (nicely named 0005_[ip]_socialgamelab.bxmc.poly.edu.conf) and look into the file. I compare it with the working virtual hosts .conf file and find, they’re also the same.

Now I begin to ask myself things like “Why?” and “What?” but at the same time begin to wonder how Leopard Server is messing this up. The site loads properly if I direct the browser to it’s long directory, but still only gives me the main site if I use the new virtual host name.

I am still in the process of working on getting this to work. I have a list made up of how I am going to resolve this. I think I will update as I go through the list.

1. Comb the internet for help, this includes Apple discussion forums, and of course Google.
2. Change the bxmc to idmi. This could be conflicting on our network which is still using idmi for everything else.
3. Call Apple Support. When you buy Apple server products, like every other server retailer, you get support. We have support for our recently purchased Mac OS 10.5 Server, I will utilize this to it’s fullest extent.
4. Replace the entire apache configuration with a default configuration from another system that works. Last resort because I really do not want to re-configure the webserver.

Covering the List

1. I have been searching the internet and Apple discussion boards for hours (before I wrote this post). I found one issue with domain aliases using an (*) in place of a real alias, but nothing that fixed the problem yet.
2. IS has changed it to IDMI a little while ago, I’m waiting for it to update. Let’s hope this is the last step.