Jeremy Visser

Now that I have my own domain with the ability to use subdomains, I would rather be able to access Webmin via a subdomain of my site, rather than by forwarding an additional port number, like 10000, which Webmin uses by default.

Because of the fact the Webmin’s built-in web server doesn’t support subdomains, and because WordPress MU requires all the subdomains to be forwarded to it by a wildcard for the sake of sanity, I decided the only way to retain my head and serve Webmin over a subdomain would be to use Apache (and Virtual Hosts) as a mediator.

After Googling for a while, I found two options for doing this, and each seemed equally as appealing:

• Using Virtual Hosts on Apache and serving Webmin via CGI.
• Using Virtual Hosts on Apache and serving Webmin via mod_proxy.

Read more…

After a year-and-a-half’s partnership with my old free subdomain powered by No-IP, I’ve finally got a real domain to call my own, which is SunriseRoad.net!

The whole SunriseRoad.net site is now running on WordPress MU, including this blog. Thanks to WordPress’ WXR import-and-export format, it was quite easy to migrate from my old blog to this one (though my page hierachy and blogroll was not preserved). You should be seamlessly transferred from the old blog to this one, thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite (hence the blog title ’301 Moved Permanently’).

I must say, however, after all the setting up that I have done on this site, WPMU is not all that great. I mean, it seems the opposite of WordPress’ philosophy of code is poetry. Much of MU seems to have not been well-engineered, so it can be an absolute pain for me to debug and customise.

Having said that, I am going to start contributing patches to the MU project, in the hope of improving it. Here’s my first one already.

All the themes and plugins that I have tried on WPMU work surprisingly well. The plugins I am currently running are:

• Akismet
• Bad Behaviour 2.0.10
• WordPress Widgets
• WP-FeedLocations
• WP-SlimStat 0.9.2 (with some fixes applied unrelated to WPMU)

This linking policy by the Irish Cancer Society has got to be one of the greatest example of illiteracy I have seen in a long time.

The policy has many conditions about the type of links I use, and have to get permission by fax to link to their site. I see that I am violating points 1 and 2 of the policy, but how can they possibly enforce that? Especially seeing as though Google crawls each page and links to each one.

As one comment on the post I got the link from says:

They’re attempting the equivalent of trying to stop me from standing on the sidewalk and pointing at their office without prior written permission.

A few months ago, I migrated my web server from a 500MHz (or was it 450MHz?) Pentium III to a dual-450MHz Pentium II server after the 6GB hard drive died after a power surge.

I reinstalled Ubuntu 6.06 from scratch and installing Apache, PHP and MySQL manually. I then restored the database with one of my backup scripts. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the debian-sys-maint user on the old server had a different randomly-generated password to the one on the new server. When I restored the backup, the user was given the old password.

So, whenever I tried to install a Debian package that tried to automatically configure MySQL (like mediawiki) it would fail to set anything up, as it was always trying to use the wrong password. Luckily, I’ve found out how to fix that.

The password dpkg uses for the debian-sys-maint user is located in the file /etc/mysql/debian.cnf. That file is protected from prying eyes, so in order to access it, you’ll need to use sudo:

sudo less /etc/mysql/debian.cnf

In that file, you’ll see two or so lines containing something like the following:

password = AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHh

That part to the right of the = sign is the password dpkg wants to use for updating your MySQL database. Believe it or not, that is the actual password in clear text. Not encrypted. Keep that password handy, we’re going to need it soon.

Open your preferred method of administering your MySQL database. Typically that will be either MySQL Administrator or phpMyAdmin. When you are in it, log on and go to the spot where you manage users. In phpMyAdmin, this section is called privileges.

Find the debian-sys-maint user. Then use the function to change the password. The password you set it to will be the one you found in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf, similar in format to AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHh. Save changes.

Now you should be all done. Try apt-get installing something.

I haven’t tested on Windows, but on Linux versions of Firefox 2.0 the option entitled “New pages should be opened in new tab/window” is broken. Fortunately, you can still force links that would normally open in a new window to open in a new tab.