This website is hosted in one of these servers: http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/rps_offers.xml

OVH offers a wide list of possible OS to install in your dedicated box and I believe the best one is Debian, I love its simplicity, community support, security and above all its cleanliness, you start with a clean base system and you install and configure just what you need, having full control of it.

In OVH you can install Debian 5 (Lenny), which is ideal for web hosting, but if you want to upgrade Debian 6 (Squeeze), much up-to-date and now stable, this is how to do it:

• 1. Install Debian50_x64 from the OVH Manager (in one of two partitions, I chose one).
• 2. Updated it:


aptitude update
aptitude upgrade


• 3. Changed /etc/apt/sources.list replacing “lenny” with “squeeze”.
• 4. Prepare the upgrade:


aptitude update
aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude


• 5. Avoid a problem with UDEV before upgrading: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=52360

touch /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade

• 6. Avoid a problem with locale during the upgrade:


apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales


• 7. Upgrade all packages.

apt-get dist-upgrade

• 8. During this installation the key questions to respond are the ones regarding the boot, because the system will boot from the Netboot using the OVH kernel the questions about Lilo and Grup should be just set to do nothing.

• 9. That completes the upgrade, but in my case, after all packages were upgraded, the system for some reason didn’t generate the disk devices in /dev properly. I had the system mounted in /dev/sda1 but the swap was not mounted. In fact there were no /dev/sda or /dev/uba at all. To fix this you would need to create the missing devices and mount your swap (believe me you don’t want a server without swap). So first check the major and minor values from the partition info:

cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

180 0 503808 uba
180 1 497983 uba1
8 0 20971520 sda
8 1 20479969 sda1

• 10.  Create the devices accordingly to your values above, then you can enable the swap disk again, in my example:

mknod /dev/uba b 180 0
mknod /dev/uba1 b 180 1
swapon -a
mknod /dev/sda b 8 0
mknod /dev/sda1 b 8 1

• 11. That is all, the system has all packages upgraded now and I am happy running Apache 2.2.16 with PHP 5.3.3 !!

Update: Now that Squeeze is stable you might want to try to upgrade to Debian “wheezy” (testing) in order to have newer versions of packages and still a very robust system. I would say that after upgrading to Squeeze you might just have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list again and replace “squeeze” with “wheezy”, then “apt-get update” and “apt-get dist-upgrade”. If anyone tries please let me know what problems (if any) encountered.

Not happy with the existing solutions/plugins to generate photo albums in WordPress I decided to create my own based on a BASH script and some PHP code.

• Upload the photos you want to a folder, example:

http://abadcer.com/photos/

• Because this folder doesn’t contain any index.php or default.html or similar I enabled “directory browsing” so you can see the files, in this case the photos, and click on them to see them. To do so create a file called .htaccess and put inside:

+Indexes

• At this point you just have some folders with big JPG files inside, I decided to automate a process which creates thumbnails of this files in a subfolder called “.thumbs”. It is designed to search all JPGs in all the subfolders. My example worked in Debian in the folder where the images are:

find . -type f | grep -E "jpg|JPG" | grep -v "/.thumbs/" | awk '{ run="convert -geometry 150x150 " "\"" $0 "\" ";
file=$0;
sub(/(.*)\//, "", file);
folder=$0;
sub(file, "", folder);
system("mkdir " "\"" folder ".thumbs/" "\"");
run=run "\"" folder ".thumbs/" file "\"";
system(run);}'

• This will create the thumbnail (max 150 pixels wide or long) in /.thumbs/ subfolder. It basically finds all JPG files and run this command for each file found:

convert -geometry '150x150' "./Alex day 5/DSC_6395_resize.JPG" "./Alex day 5/.thumbs/DSC_6395_resize.JPG"

• Finally you just need a PHP code which reads the file list in the folders, and generates the links to the files showing the thumbnails, like in here: http://abadcer.com/photos/2011-02 Alex/

<?php
if ($handle = opendir('.')) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
$jpg = strpos($file,"JPG");
$jpg_low = strpos($file,"jpg");
if($jpg == true | $jpg_low == true) {
echo "<a href=\"$file\"> <img src=\".thumbs/$file\" /></a>\n";
}
}
closedir($handle);
}
?>


• Got a domain in 123-reg.co.uk
• Got a dedicated Linux server from ovh.co.uk
• Got Apache2, MySQL and PHP5 installed
• Changed the DNS settings of abadcer.com to point to this server.
• Downloaded and install WordPress from wordpress.org
• Found a nice theme to skin the site.
• Done

It is easier than what it looks, more details soon.