32MB.ORG

There are lots of backup method out there, one of my fav is backup my VPS to a free storage service from Dropbox. I'm using a script from Dave Hope, based on another script from Andrea Fabrizi. Run it as root, or you can automate it using Crontab. It looks like I have something to report about using pre tag here, meanwhile you can download the script here.

Save the script as DropboxBackup.sh chmod +x and run it as root. If you want to automate it, create new Crontab as follow:

$ crontab -e
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 0 1 * *       /bin/bash /path/to/DropboxBackup.sh

That will auto backup-ing your specified folder once in a month.

Now we have a working web server with PHP-CGI and SQLite installed, and it's running pretty well with less than 20 MB RAM used. Don't know how to squeeze more RAM usage, but I think less than 32 MB is enough. We need to add a domain, so we can have a fully working blog. I don't think DNS server will fit this VPS, so I'm using another VPS as my DNS server and point the A record to my IP. Lighttpd supports both Name-based and IP-based virtual hosts. Here's how I add a virtual host to Lighttpd:

1. After login to your VPS and becoming root, create a directory for your domain. I'm using 32mb.org for example, so I created 32mb.

mkdir -p /home/lighttpd/32mb
mkdir -p /home/lighttpd/32mb/public

2. Setup a public directory owner to web server user, lighttpd or www-data.

chown lighttpd:lighttpd /home/lighttpd/32mb/public

3. In case you forgot, allow a web server user to access our logs.

chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/log/lighttpd

4. Open Lighttpd Configuration file.

nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

5. Add support for your domain, put it at the end of the file.

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|\.)32mb\.org$" {
server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/32mb/public"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/32mb/access.log"
server.error-handler-404 = "/e404.php"
}

That's means:

• $HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|\.)32mb\.org$" - It will match request for both www.32mb.org and 32mb.org
• server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/32mb/public" - Server document root. You must set ftp/ssh user home directory to this root only
• accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/32mb/access.log" - Server error log file
• server.error-handler-404 = "/e404.php" - Web server error 404 handler file

6. Restart your web server.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

7. Remember to point your domain A record to your VPS IP. Test. 8. Done. Now we have a fully working domain pointed to our VPS.

For Blite! to works, I need a web server, PHP, and SQLite. Choose Lighttpd (Lighty) for web server software, PHP 5.3 with CGI, SQLite ext. and Xmlprc so I can use Blogspam.net for spam protection. The "pstree" result look like this:

andri@32mb:~$ pstree
init-+-cron
     |-dropbear---dropbear---sh---pstree
     |-kthreadd/708---khelper/708
     |-lighttpd---php5-cgi---4*[php5-cgi]
     `-sendmail-mta

After preparing my new box, next step is installing SQLite:

apt-get install sqlite

then Lighttpd:

apt-get install lighttpd

install the PHP scripting language and its supporting files:

apt-get install php5-cgi php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

edit the php.ini file:

nano /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

scroll down through the text of the php.ini file until you come to a line beginning with cgi.fix_pathinfo (use ctrl+w for search), uncomment the line so it look like this:

; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI.  $
; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not $
; what PATH_INFO is.  For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs.  Se$
; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the spec.  A sett$
; of zero causes PHP to behave as before.  Default is 1.  You should fix your s$
; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED.
; http://php.net/cgi.fix-pathinfo
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Next step is add a user to the system which the Lighttpd server can use. This is performed as a standard UNIX useradd procedure as follows:

useradd -d /home/lighttpd -m -s /bin/bash lighttpd

now, open the lighttpd.conf configuration file:

nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Add mod_fastcgi and uncomment mod_rewrite in case we need it. File will look like this:

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
        "mod_rewrite",
        "mod_fastcgi",
)

server.document-root        = "/var/www"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "lighttpd"
server.groupname            = "lighttpd"

index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                                "index.htm", "default.htm",
                               " index.lighttpd.html" )

url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl"

dir-listing.encoding        = "utf-8"
server.dir-listing          = "enable"

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/x-javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((
"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi",
"socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-environment" => (
"PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
"PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "1000"
),
)))

Save ctrl+o and close ctrl+x, and then change the lighttpd log folder owner to lighttpd:

chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/log/lighttpd

check if Lighttpd process with pidof lighttpd, if a number, or series of numbers show up, then it means Lighttpd is currently running. In this case, restart Lighttpd for the new configurations to take effect:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

If Lighttpd isn't running already, start it by entering the following:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

point your browser to your VPS IP, see if its working.

That should be it, now we need a working domain for our blog id. Will talk about it on the next post.

IPXCore doesn't provide a Debian 6 minimal install on their SolusVM control panel. So, I have to remove several process that considered "not-needed". After updating and upgrading, apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade and installing Nano, Localpurge and Dropbear apt-get -y install nano localepurge dropbear I removed following process:

/etc/init.d/saslauthd stop
/etc/init.d/apache2 stop
/etc/init.d/xinetd stop
/etc/init.d/samba stop
/etc/init.d/bind9 stop
/etc/init.d/ssh stop

and prevent them to run on restart/start-up:

update-rc.d saslauthd remove
update-rc.d apache2 remove
update-rc.d xinetd remove
update-rc.d samba remove
update-rc.d bind9 remove
update-rc.d ssh remove 

Start Dropbear as a replacement for OpenSSH, make it running by default by changing its config:

nano /etc/default/dropbear

set NO_START=1 to NO_START=0 and add some config for security, change the port and prevent root login:

# disabled because OpenSSH is installed change to NO_START=0 to enable Dropbear
NO_START=1 ;change to 0 

# the TCP port that Dropbear listens on
DROPBEAR_PORT=22 ;change to whatever port you want

# any additional arguments for Dropbear
DROPBEAR_EXTRA_ARGS="" ;add -w to prevent root login

You can also replace Syslog by Syslog-ng:

/etc/init.d/syslog stop
update-rc.d syslog remove
apt-get install -y syslog-ng

After reboot you will have a box running by (not more than) 10MB RAM. Done for now, next post will be installing Lighttpd, PHP, and SQLite, and then Blite! itself.

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