The G String

I thought I used to know some good places on the web to get hold of affordable components, but I have been totally frustrated in my search for AMD and Intel CPUs today.

I’m putting together a server that will be used to support my endeavours as a freelance web developer. Very soon I will have a server that is hosted in a data centre (rather than my living room), that I can use to host the web projects that I’m working on.

I am considering the Tyan barebone systems for starters, and these seem to be readily available. But after spending a couple of hours on scan, ebuyer and ebay, as well as google shopping and other sites I’ve never visited before, it would seem that I can’t buy any CPUs to put in the damn thing. Have AMD and Intel gone bust without telling me?

Scan don’t even stock 1000 series or 2000 series opterons, although they sell a Tyan barebones that takes dual-core opterons. I’ve had some experience using sun servers and HP servers at my time with Titan Entertainment, but I was hoping to save a few quid building my own. Anyone know any good e-tailers or know why AMD CPUs are so scarce?

Gotcha! Don’t make the mistake I just made when setting up digest authentication in apache2. Depending on whether you’re using basic or digest authentication, you need to use a different command line tool to generate your passwords. After fifteen minutes of confusion, I realised that I needed htdigest to generate my passwords rather than htpasswd, although this crucial fact is not obvious from a glance at the documenation.

A typical setup for digest authentication is:

<Location /some/url>
      AuthType Digest
      AuthName "realm"
      AuthDigestDomain /some/url
      AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
      Require valid-user

</Location>

Then use htdigest…

htdigest -c /path/to/.htpasswd realm username

One of the things I found when getting my Wordpress installation going was that I wanted to run a seperate subdomain for it, whilst keeping my secure server that I use for developing websites running SSL on port 443.

Normally, to set up virtual hosting, I would add something like this in my site’s config file:

<VirtualHost *>

But to keep the hosts listening on the right ports, you need to add the port number to the wildcard:

<VirtualHost *:80>

Trouble was, when you use the NameVirtualHost directive in apache2, you can’t mix the port numbers.

The solution was found on Friend’s of Bart http://fob.po8.org/comment/reply/289

Simply use

NameVirtualHost *:80

NameVirtualHost *:443

Both in your apache2.conf file. Then in each of your site’s config file, use the explicit port number on the VirtualHost directive:

<VirtualHost *:80>

<VirtualHost *:443>