Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I seized the boring time in the past days (I've had a really bad cold) and migrated my photo gallery to Flickr. So far I hosted the photos on my own, using Gallery. While Gallery is a great tool that allowed me to comfortablly manage and present my images, it has one great flaw: I host it by myself. That means a) that serving images from my server costs quite a bit of performance, if you involve PHP and even a database, and b) that I need to take care for updates myself. The first issue is a minor one, since my server is powerful enough to serve the job and not that many people are interessted. The second topic is much more disturbing, since I need to keep track about security updates all the time and need to bring an update in place ASAP, if one occurs.

Long story short, I played with the idea of migrating to Flickr for a longer time now and the only point that was keeping me back was the migration effort. Luckily a little Gallery module, called Gallery2Flickr, exists, which eases the job quite a bit. Therefore I seized the chance and performed the migration of all existing albums by now and you can find my image collection on Flickr, now. Sorry for destroying all the external photo links this way, anyway you can still reach my gallery on http://photos.schlitt.info and through the long way http://schlitt.info/applications/gallery.

After my server was close to wasting all its CPU time for checking email messages for potential spam using Spamassassin I decided that it was time to investigate. My friend Arne, who helped me a lot with Qmail problems earlier, recommended to install spamdyk, an SMTP spam filter that is placed in front of Qmail and does not require specially patches for the MTA itself. Spamdyk can filter mail by blacklisting, whitelisting, greylisting and using several other options.

Thanks to Arne for this great tip! Spamdyk is up and running now on my maschine and my load is now constantly below 0.40, while spam receival seems to be reduced drastically. Since I did not find much information about Spamdyk on Gentoo, I wrote down my experiences as a little howto in the Gentoo wiki. Maybe someone finds it helpfull. Any feedback welcome!

No, not myself, but my server. Until now I ow a 1und1 Root Server L, which I bought more than 2 years ago. Now that 1und1 offers a new generation of servers, I decided to switch to a 64-bit machine. My old server had a Celeron processor, 256 MB RAM and 20 GB HD, which could not really handle my spam protection anymore. The new one is an Athlon 64 3000+, has 1 GB RAM and 2 80 GB SATA discs, which I run as a soft raid.

While migrating all of my stuff (28 domains, which I host for myself and friends) to the new server, I decided to switch the platform, I'm running, completely. While I still claimed a few weeks ago, that Debian is my favorite system for servers, I now have Gentoo running. I know, this is a system most people would never use for something else but desktops, but for one major reason it's better for me than Debian in this place: I'm more familiar with it! While I used Debian constantly more than 2 years on all of my machines, I got much too used to the Gentoo style of doing things in the past month and always tried stuff like "$ eix spamassassin" or "$ emerge -pv apache". Gentoo is simply cleaner and I have a much better overview on what my system has installed and what should be running.

When switching the system itself, I decided to go for other server software, too. While Postfix is a cool MTA, it's still hard to configure (naturally easier than Sendmail, but still hard) and it took me 2 weeks to figure out how stuff has to work. Since there is a very nice Gentoo-Howto for Qmail and it looked like this one is capable of everything I basically need for my personal playground, I went this way. Believe me or not, setting up my whole mail stuff (including virtual domains and accounts, spam and virii protection, mailing lists,...) took me 2 man days. Qmail, qmail-scanner, vpopmail, ezmlm, qmailadmin and maildrop give you a fantastically clean interface, to realize even complex architectures easily.

Beside my migration from Postfix to Qmail, I started (influenced by Kore) to use Lighttpd as my web server. Lighttpd is developed by Jan Kneschke and is a lighweight, easy to configure and secure web server. Most convenient, it uses the FCGI interface to address PHP, which is almost as fast as using Apache with mod_php, but gives you a huge bunch of flexibility. For instance I run 2 versions of PHP (4.4 and 5.1) in parallel inside 1 server, being able to define on a host or filename basis, which version to choose.

The migration is now almost complete and I'm very satisfied with the results. So long, thanks Qmail and Lighttpd! See some more info on my setup in the extended body of this entry.

Take this as compassion to Davey and his friends and as a first try getting links together for his blog entry to get a better page rank.

Read what happened to him.

Domain)Factory (Germany's 5th largest web hosting company) recently announced to fully support PHP 5.0.0. For nearly every package Domain)Factory offers it's possible to enable PHP 5 support within a simple .htaccess. By default files with the extensiuon .php5 are run through it.

Nice to see that PHP 5 gets acceptance so fast. :)