I’m not sure what I do and where I go is all that interesting, but you never know

The first noticeable change is the major overhaul to the Admin interface. They actually worked with the Happy Cog team to put together a very nice and much cleaner interface. Happy Cog are the folks behind ‘A List Apart’ and ‘An Event Apart’ which I’ve been to a couple of times now. I was previously using a plugin to replace the Admin interface but I may stick with the default now

Anyway, if you run a Wordpress blog, make sure to upgrade ASAP.

The first step was to stop loading the basic auth module

sudo rm /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/auth_basic.load

Now I needed to include the digest auth module

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/auth_digest.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/auth_digest.load

Pretty straight-forward, though none of the guides I looked at mentioned it. Next I needed to use the ‘htdigest’ command to create the text file to store the username and password. It is highly recommended (for obvious reasons) that this file not be within a directory apache makes available to the web. Create a new directory outside of /var/www and change to it.

htdigest -c digest main rwaters

The htdigest command takes 3 parameters (and an optional -c flag to create a new file), the first param is the filename, second is the realm (more on this in a bit), and the third is the username. The command then prompts you to enter and re-enter the password, it hashes it and creates a text file. The last required bit is to modify the apache config to actually use auth-digest and point it to the digest text file. If you left everything as the default Ubuntu settings then the config file that defines directories and access to them is in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default. To make the settings global I applied them within the directive.

AuthType Digest
AuthName “main”
AuthUserFile /path/to/the/digest/file/from/above
Require valid-user

Pretty straight-forward, the AuthName setting matches up to the realm you defined when generating the password. The one thing that kept throwing me was that the guides I looked at said to use AuthDigestFile instead of AuthUserFile and apache kept claiming that AuthDigestFile was not a valid configuration option. Anyway, you can add as many username and password combinations as you like to the digest text file. Next up for me is to enable SSL and force all urls to redirect to HTTPS.

I guess I really ought to port it to Dojo and learn something about that particular library in the process. Whenever I’ve tried in the past though I’ve found it a bit like banging my head on a brick wall…

- Jake H (codestore)

I’ve played around with VMware server a bit in the past, ever since they offered it up free of charge. Since they recently released 2.0 beta I figured I’d give that a try. The new beta has replaced the old admin app with a slick new web interface. Even taking control over a vm is moved into a java control within the web interface, the first time you connect in it downloads a small browser plugin, but from then on you can control everything right within the browser. Pretty Impressive.

Setup is pretty much the same, you walk through a little wizard that lets you configure the various hardware (processor, ram, network, hard drive, etc) once you’ve built a shell vm you can mount an iso into the cd-rom and install the OS just as you would on a physical machine. Rather than download a different image (iso) I just grabbed what I had handy and installed Ubuntu 7.10 desktop edition. Everything installed very smoothly. After the box came back up I installed apache, ruby, rubygems, rails, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, and several other gems. I whipped up a quick sample app and pointed the apache configuration at it. With everything installed it probably only took 30 minutes of work and a couple hours just letting it install things… not bad. Also in the process I moved over the original rPath LAMP image to the new VMware server so that they’re all in the same place.

The first server I wanted to get up and running is LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP). For Demo’s I’ve used Xampp on Win boxes as it’s really easy to get up and running. I wanted the flexibility to start and stop the entire server and have multiple versions configured differently for separate projects, so I figured VM would be the better way to go. After a bit of searching I ran across a couple different pre-configured VM images: Grandma’s Lamp and rPath LAMP Appliance. Grandma’s Lamp was based on Xubuntu, rPath appears to be it’s own stripped down distro (or at least I couldn’t figure out what it’s derived from). The latest version I could find for Grandma’s Lamp was nearing two years old so I opted to go with the rPath appliance as it was updated earlier this month.

They offer a crazy variety of ways to get the appliance up and running – vmware, xen, cd image, amazon machine image, MS VHD… Since I did’t have any dedicated hardware ready to go I grabbed the version for VMware Player and it loaded up like a charm. The web interface was pretty slick, and even uses a touch of Mochikit for effects/ajax functionality.

Next up, Rails w/Mongrel cluster, then I expect I’ll follow in Tim’s footsteps (hopefully with better luck) and try to set up Domino in a VM.

As for Ext.nd, I plan to continue working on the project and will still be giving the presentation next month at Lotusphere– See you there!

Apple tries to toss in a download of the new version of quicktime by default. Also the installer tries to offer some additional “Bonjour Service” but you can opt out of anything you don’t want.

Will be nice to be able to test out sites in Safari now…