Good time playing in the Men’s A this weekend in Ocean Beach. Had a great partner in Jordan Morgan (who also brough an amazing cheering gallery).
A few pictures from the reunion we had with the extended Evans family.
Part two: ISP, Modem / Router and Registration
In part one we focused on building and installing the hardware and software needed to host a website. The article focuses on
In a residential setting internet connections are provided by an ISP. The ISP provides a gateway / modem to connect to the internet that include basic routing functions. Individuals may also install a router to implement more advanced routing rules and network management. The key to these components are to ensure the gateway forwards all traffic to the router and the router forward specific ports (80, http, 443, https) to the computer hosting the website.
Make sure to add port forwarding rules so the router passes data on ports 80 and 443 to the computer that is hosting the website.
ISPs may have some other gotchas that make hosting difficult. They may block specific ports. Normally, the block port 25 to prevent spam but other go so far as to block port 80 which will make web hosting really difficult. ISPs also normally assign IP addresses via DHCP. If the lease for DHCP is short it will make maintaining DNS really difficult.
The good news as all the hurdles listed can be mitigated through a call to the ISP.
Every website needs a web address that is provisioned by a registrar. There are a solid list of them available and include names like Square Space and Go Daddy. Prices for web addresses vary. Most off brand names go for $20 per year. Choose a registrar enter some billing information and the domain is yours.
Now the web address needs to be associated with the IP address you are hosting from and this is managed by DNS entries. Normally, the registrar provides an interface for managing these values. The basic entry needed for forwarding traffic to your address is:
| Host | Type | Priority | Data |
| @ | A | N/A | <IP Address> |
In Part Three we will look at spinning up some containers.
Part one: The gear and the software
Just finished hosting this web site utilizing containers to learn a bit more about docker and docker compose. There were several great sites to move me along my way and then the pure excitement of backing up the existing site and restoring it to the new system.
The equipment: Built this little engine from scratch, my first build. Used the guts of an old system that I purchased years ago. Gutted the motherboard, cpu and ram while retaining the power supply, fans and hard drives.
Hardware
The software: I had previously been hosting the system with the software listed below so why change what ain’t broke. Well except moving it to containers…
| Service | Software |
| Operating System | Ubuntu |
| Image Management | Docker |
| Web Server | nginx |
| Database | mysql |
| Content Management | wordpress |
Now we are off to the races. The system is willing to turn on but the mother board is flashing indicators that something is wrong. Okay, needed to read though the motherboard specification to find that led 3 mean that the ram is bad. So powered down the system and more firmly inserted the ram. Bingo, we make it to the bios which in turn seems to recognize everything.
Software
Downloaded Ubuntu to a flash drive and created a USB bootable image. Pointed the bios to boot from USB and we are off to the races with the OS installation and creation of a user account. Now is a good time to propose getting a solid password management tool because by the end of this you will have accumulated several (check out KeePassXC).
Time to install docker because it will help with the management of
* images – snapshot of the software to be run
* containers – running instance of the software
* volumes – ability for containers to access a centralized set of data
That will eventually host the web site.
Had an absolute blast playing with Midjourney today. This is an AI software that lets you build images from a narrative you provide. The new web icon was produced by this software. See below.
I feel this picture pretty well encompasses Blue Elysium. Give the software a try on Discord.
You can also see the work I did. Good, bad and really bad.
| Item | Selection | Notes |
| Operating System | Ubuntu | Standard Linux installation. |
| Database | mySQL | Free open source database. |
| Web Server | nginx | Free open source web server. Yeah chose this ahead of Apache. |
| Language | php | Standard language for web programming. Word Press will hide most programming from you but it is good to know what is going on under the hood. |
| Content Management | Word Press | This is the application used to build the web site. It manages the assets needed to bring your web site to life. |
| Certification | letsencrypt Certbot | This service provides that you are the administer of your site and provides a certificate so you can list your site as https:// |
Backup the Database. Used Export function from my SQL Workbench
Backup Word Press: Copy the entire word press directory to another folder.
I was trying to determine how to increase the file upload size for a Word Press instance running on nginx.
Came across the following: https://medium.com/@stefanledin/increase-file-upload-size-in-wordpress-on-nginx-server-19626f4ef8b9
This site offered a means of addressing the php instance and nginx to increase file upload sizes to 128M (or whatever size you want..)