Switcharound

Over the past few months, I’ve really put a lot of effort into developing mini-applications for our campus intranet. When I finally obtained a short, descriptive domain name, tbc.sc, I decided it was time to get a good LAMP to serve as our new PHP driven intranet server (as opposed to the *dows box that used to run everything).

So after completing two quarters at school in Linux administration, I felt comfortable enough to go ahead.

I found one of our unused, but newer, boxes and threw a HDD and some RAM in it. Over the next couple of days, I’d have it installed and ready to go. The rest, so they say, is history.

Jonathan sent me a nice little class that allowed PHP to interface with our Active Directory server, and before I knew it, I had half a dozen or so apps that were running smoothly on the new server, all being authenticated against AD.

Recently, however, I have become disappointed with both our internet filtering and monitoring server, ipcop, and our mailscanner box. I have been wanting to set up email and internet “kiosks” in the library for some time, but never had the chance to since our filter doesn’t actually log usernames, only computers (actually, ip addresses). An anonymous kiosk would be nearly impossible to trace. I needed a filter that would authenticate against active directory via the web interface.

Enter a great looking little server, CensorNet.

This seems to do everything I want it to, and yet it’s still free! Couldn’t ask for more.

The only problem is, I have no computer to install it on. It needs a nice little system to run on, and I simply was out of good boxen on which to install it. However, I remembered that Matt (an army guy who works in our Printshop when he’s not overseas) had convinced his bosses to donate one of their old P3 servers to us. Since apache and php can run on next to nothing, I decided to move the intranet over to that box, and use the old intranet box for CensorNet.

Well, that’s what I’ve been doing today. I’ve installed CentOS 4.4 with PHP and MySQL (the old box was lacking MySQL support in PHP), and moved away from Fedora :-(

So, what does all this have to do with the title, “Switcharound”?

Well, after months of work, studying, and trial/error, you’d think that I’d be smarter now, wouldn’t you? Well, not so.

I moved all the files over to the new box, configured apache, set hostnames, opened the firewall, but for some reason, I just could not connect to the machine through my browser! It drove me crazy! I was pouring over .conf files, starting and stopping services, rebooting the machine, anything I could think of. But, guess what the problem was? Yep, I had the wrong network cable plugged in. Presto, Bango! Hallelujah, it works!

So what’s your point? Well, let’s not forget that many things will change in life, but we are always capable of making stupid mistakes :-)

n…n

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