Tried out nitrous.io

Yesterday I set up a basic account with nitrous.io.  This gives me a virtual linux box with a selection of ready to go development environments.  I decided on "go".

For a sample project I went through the tutorial web server that the golang folks provided :

http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/

I used the environment almost without modification.  The only slight tweak that I applied was to get a new collection of vim runtime files using rsync ( as shown here: http://www.vim.org/runtime.php ) and add support for go ( as shown here: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/text-editors/vim/ ).

I was able to ssh into the nitrous.io box and use screen so that my working environment stayed alive even when the connection was broken.  The nitrous.io environment provides several ports for the server to choose from to listen on.  I was able to save my work in a git environment and clone the git tree back to my home machine.

Completing the tt-rss install using a browser

In the browser on your windows machine, go to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/tt-rss/install (substituting the appropriate IP address for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx )  For example, I chose the address 192.168.1.131 so I navigate to 192.168.1.131/tt-rss/install as shown below.  Click on "Test Configuration"

If everything has gone right up to now, you should see the page shown below.  Click on the red "Initialize Database" button.

Now you should seen the page shown below in your browser.  Click on "Save configuration" towards the bottom of the screen.

You should see the message shown below indicating that the configuration was successfully saved.  Click on the blue "loading tt-rss now" link.

From here you should be able to login as "admin" with password "password".  Change that password before setting up access over the internet.

From the "Preferences" option in the menu under Actions, you can create new users:

Preparing Ubuntu for the tt-rss installation

To install tt-rss on your server you will need to do the following:

• Install apache2. postgresql, and some php packages
• Create a database user ( ttrss_user )
• Create a database (ttrss_db) belonging to the user just created.
• Download the tt-rss package
• Unpack the tt-rss package
• Copy the tt-rss directory to /var/www/tt-rss and assign it the appropriate owner/group ( www-data ).

These steps are shown in more detail below:

To install the apropriate packages, type

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 postgresql php5-pgsql php5-curl

as shown in the window below:

At this point, you should be able to verify that the apache2 server is running by entering the IP address of the Ubuntu virtual machine in a browser on your windows machine.  You should see something like this:

To create a database user, ttrss_user, type 

sudo -u postgres createuser -P -S -D -R -l ttrss_user

as shown in the window below:

To create a database, ttrss_db, belonging to the user, ttrss_user, type

sudo -u postgres createdb --owner=ttrss_user ttrss_db

as shown in the window below:

To download the tt-rss package, bring up firefox, go to the tt-rss.org site, right click on the download link, and copy the link address as indicated in the following window:

Then paste the link address into a shell window as an argument to wget to form the following command:

 wget https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/archive/1.7.9.tar.gz

As of this writing ( 2013-06-06 ) this is the latest version of tt-rss but that will change in the future.  Using a browser to get the download link should insure that you get the latest version. 

This is shown in the window below:

The download will take a few minutes.  When it is done, use the tar command to unpack the tar file as shown below:

Copy the directory that the tar package expands to to /var/www/tt-rss and change the owner/group

to www-data:

sudo cp -rp Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.7.9 /var/www/tt-rss
sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/tt-rss
sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/tt-rss

as shown below:

At this point, the install can be finished from a brower.

Installing Ubuntu

A minute or so after booting from the CD you will see the following screen.  Select "Install Ubuntu"

Continue with defaults.  Ignore the option to install VMware tools.

Install Now

Select your timezone by city.

Select default keyboard.  Select username, computer name, password (I'm not going to create screenshots for these).

Start the install and wait...

In 10 or 15 minutes you should see the following screen. Press the restart button.

( My computer seemed to get stuck either while shutting down or starting up but pressing "Enter" got past the  hang ).

After the computer reboots, log in with the username/password you entered earlier.
Now press ctrl-alt-T to bring up a bash window.

At the bash shell enter:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade 

After a few minutes the upgrade should complete and your ubuntu installation will be up to date. If you repeat the above two commands the process should be much faster and cleaner.  The result should look something like this:

Next, install ssh by entering:

sudo apt-get install ssh

To access the ubuntu server at a predictable location you will need to configure a static ip address for your network interface.  If you don't do this, things will probably still work but you run the risk that at some point your ip address will change.

Select the "System Settings" button.  This may be graphically compressed but if you move your mouse towards the bottom of the window it should expand.

In the "System Settings" window, select "Network"

Select "Options" in the Network menu.

Select the IPv4 Settings Tab and enter and IP address appropriate for static use.  The DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are the Google public DNS servers and should work without problems.  Save the new values, close the Network Connections window and minimize the VMware Player window.

You may need to specify that the IP address you chose for this machine is reserved and not available for dhcp assignment.

From this point on, configuration of the Ubuntu server will be done "remotely" from from the host windows machine.

Creating the virtual machine

Install vmware player which you can download from vmware.

Download the ubuntu 13.04 disk image

Run vmware player and create a virtual machine.  Opt to install the operating system later.

Indicate that you want to install ubuntu linux.

Specify a name and location for the virtual machine:

Advance the wizard, selecting defaults.  Select "Customize Hardware" when you have the option.

Specify 2GB of memory ( this may be overkill - if you don't have that much available you can experiment with less ).

Indicate that you want to use the ubuntu 13.04 disk image that you downloaded earlier for the CD.

Specify "Bridged" for the network adapter type ( if you don't care about accessing the server from the outside world, it can be left as the default which is NAT ).

Close the hardware configuration wizard and select "Play" to start the virtual machine.

Installing tiny-tiny-rss (with postrgres database) on a vmware virtual machine running Ubuntu

A couple of days ago I installed a tiny-tiny-rss (tt-rss) server on a vmware virtual machine running Ubuntu. The virtual machine was running on a windows7 host. I also created a url that I was able to use to access the rss server from anywhere.

This was a reasonably straightforward process but along the way I ran into some minor roadblocks, all of which I eventually got past. I'm going to spell out in some detail what steps I went through for the benefit of anyone else who might want to do the same thing.

Although I was using a virtual machine to install my tt-rss server, these steps should work just fine for a normal, non-virtual ubuntu server.  I this work using Ubuntu 13.04 which already has a version of tt-rss available via apt-get.  However I found it easier to work with and configure the newest version of tt-rss from tt-rss.org rather than install tt-rss using apt-get.

It's probably not practical to actually run tt-rss on a virtual machine all the time but I did this as much as a learning process as anything else.

Step by Step:

• Creating the virtual machine. ( skip this if you are not using a virtual machine )
• Installing Ubuntu ( skip this if you already are running Ubuntu )
• Preparing the machine for tt-rss 
• Completing the tt-rss install using a web browser
• Importing feeds from google reader.  (coming soon)
• Accessing tt-rss from the internet.  (coming soon)

settings for prism video file encoder

Ourput Format: .avi

Video Compressor: MPEG64 (Native)
Sound Compressor: MP3(Native)
Sound Format: 44100HZ, 128kbps, Stereo
Average Bitrate/Second 2048
Max Bitrate/Second 4096

working zen cart

Last night after creating a zencart mysql database, the zen-cart site seemed to be working ok. I loaded up the demo and was able to play with it a little.

on the trail of php continued

Took care of my last php warning with:

aptitude install php5-gd

on the trail of php continued

I got the following warning:

MySQL Support = OFF Click here for more info


Not surprisingly, the following command took care of it:

aptitude install php5-mysql

on the trail of php continued

Next I got a message saying php was not compiled with curl. Resolved this by installing php5-curl

I have no idea (yet) what curl is.

on the trail of php

Early on in the configuration process I see this:

ERROR: date.timezone not set in php.ini. Please contact your hosting company to set the timezone in the server PHP configuration before continuing.

Modified php.ini as follows to fix:

root@zen:/etc# git diff /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
diff --git a/php5/apache2/php.ini b/php5/apache2/php.ini
index c105148..4962415 100644
--- a/php5/apache2/php.ini
+++ b/php5/apache2/php.ini
@@ -945,8 +945,8 @@ default_socket_timeout = 60

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
-; http://php.net/date.timezone
-;date.timezone =
+http://php.net/date.timezone
+date.timezone = America/Los_Angeles

; http://php.net/date.default-latitude
;date.default_latitude = 31.7667
root@zen:/etc#

installed php5

I needed to install php to take care of the php execution problems that I encountered the other day. No big surprise. Installed as follows:

aptitude install php5

I also had to clear the cache on my browser.

zen configuration not happening

Per instructions, I access
http://192.168.31.132/catalog but nothing happens.

Could be a permission problem or not auto-detecting PHP filename extensions?

https working

After following various obsolete/false leads, I found the following comment that tells how to set up apache2 ssl access:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/apache2/+bug/77675/comments/60

This seems to do the trick.

The comment correctly mentions that the key information needed is in:

/usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz

ssl apache

I'm currently trying to gloss over ssl as quickly as possible. In fact, I may soon decide to skip it altogether.

Based on this web page it looks like ssl involves server certificates ( I kind of knew this already ) and client certificates - both of which are optional. I'm hoping I can get away for the time being without any certificates.

It also looks like apache may need mod-ssl to get ssl working. I don't know if I have this already but if not, I may try just installing it and seeing if it https: starts working.

continuing with zen cart

I probably should have mentioned that I'm using this site:

http://tutorials.zen-cart.com/index.php?article=107

as a guide.

On this page, I see the following instructions:

You will need the following information for the installation:

* The physical path to your new Zen Cart™ directory
Example: /home2/zencart/public_html/catalog

* The Virtual HTTP Path (the URL to your domain and directory for your shop)
Example: http://www.mydomain.com/catalog

* The Virtual HTTPS Server (the secure URL to your domain)
Example: https://www.mydomain.com
Note: if you have a shared certificate on a virtual server this may look like:
https://mydomain.secureservername.net/
- or - https://secure.sharedservername.net/~username

* The Virtual HTTPS Path (the secure URL to your domain and directory for your shop)
Example: https://www.mydomain.com/catalog
- or - https://secure.sharedservername.net/~username/catalog

I can access:
http://192.168.31.132/

but not

https://192.168.31.132/

What's going on here?

Getting started with zen cart

Before working on a remotely hosted site, I'm using a virtual machine to try out zen-cart. My virtual machine is an vmware ubuntu 10.4 "box".

Before installing zen-cart I'm getting mysql and apache2 via aptitude:

aptitude install mysql-server
aptitude install apache2

apache2 seems to be working: I can access http://192.168.31.132/index.html to get to /var/www/index.html . That location is set in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default .

setting up a trial e-commerce site

As a learning experience I'm setting up an e-commerce site. It may not go anywhere. I just signed up for a year of bluehost providing. My intention is to use zen-cart for the shopping site management - at least at first.

How to specify a remote branch in git

Thanks to "Toolman Tim" - Setting Up a New Remote Git Repository

Plagiarized from Tim for quick reference:

$ ssh myserver.com
Welcome to myserver.com!
$ mkdir /var/git/myapp.git && cd /var/git/myapp.git
$ git --bare init
Initialized empty Git repository in /var/git/myapp.git
$ exit
Bye!

$ cd ~/Sites/myapp
$ git remote add origin ssh://myserver.com/var/git/myapp.git
$ git push origin master