Given the fact that I’ve been snowed in at home the last several evenings, I really don’t have anything to post on here.  However, I’m on such a roll that I feel I should put in something, so I will delight everyone with an update on the status of my latest webserver iteration.  As of last night I finally moved it from “work in progress” status to “ready for production.”

As I’m sure everyone remembers, I recently migrated this site from my long-running NSLU2 onto a Synology DS111.  The trusty NSLU2 certainly served me well, especially given the price, but eventually it proved woefully underpowered.  As a matter of fact there was a dark period in my life where I actually ran everything on my Windows desktop, but we don’t talk about that.  Enter the DS111.  After much research I finally decided on that particular unit as a good compromise on hardware, price-point, and energy usage.  (Some small part of me still wishes I would have opted for the dual-bay DS211, but that nearly doubled the price.)  I was also naively convinced I could set up the entire thing to my liking right out of the box, with no customization required, which would save me a lot of time.  I’ve made that same idealistic statement many times before, and it’s never worked out once.  Within hours of unpacking it and turning it on I had already flashed it with Optware, instantly voiding the warranty but giving me many more “opportunities.”  For the first several months I worked with a mix of the stock features and the Optware packages, but by now it’s entirely running the Optware add-ons.  So, without further ado, I shall regale you with a fascinating synopsis of the finished product.

For a while I ran the stock setup;  Apache webserver with Synology’s flavor of PHP + MySQL.  Honestly this worked fine and I probably could have gotten away with it, but I found myself staring at the system utilization constantly and thinking “It could do better.”  So, my first step was to ditch Apache for Lighttpd, which is what I ran forever on the old NSLU2.  I quickly ran into problems getting it to work like I wanted though, so after another bout of research I settled on nginx.  This proved to be the answer to all life’s problems, with the minor issue of setting up a virtual host.  I only need that function occasionally for phpmyadmin,  so after a half-hearted attempt at wading through nginx’s mostly foreign-language support pages, I settled on using lighttpd for that, and just shutting it back down when I’m finished.  The next hurdle was the quirky Synology SQL package.  I got it all tuned up like I wanted performance-wise, only to find that the server would hang every time I shut it down.  (OK, I didn’t REALLY accidentally turn it off when we were on vacation, I made one final SQL change on the way out the door and it locked up.)  I puzzled over this for a few weeks, and finally ended up moving off their stuff onto Optware flavors of the same, which proved more challenging than I anticipated by quite some stretch.

The final step was some means of preserving all these fascinating changes and updates in case of a system failure.  After monkeying around with the built-in backup, and a few other wildly complicated third-party options, I finally enlisted the help of my fellow “tinkerer” Mike, who is much more skilled in the ways of the Linux Jedi than I.  As it turned out he already had a well-written package of scripts which, with some minor modifications, fit my needs just fabulously and with far less head-scratching than anything else I had tried.  I tested it all extensively last night and it worked just peachy.  So now you can all sleep well at night knowing this site is auto-magically backed up regularly, albeit not to an off-site location.  Speaking of which, I wonder if I could…  NO, NO, I AM DONE WITH IT.

See, I told you not to read this update.