Dirk-Jan’s blog

Last week I setup a server in a cloud based on Xen virtualization technology. After some hours research I decided to go for the Rackspace cloud. I chose the minimal setup to start with, which is a 256MB memory configuration that comes with 10GB disk space. As stated in the specs, the 256MB plan will get you 1/64 of the CPU allocation. Which is fine to start with for a standard LAMP setup.

For now they only offer a large variety of Linux distributions. I chose Debian 5.0 Lenny, because it makes migration easier as the site is running on Debian 5.0 already. The registration process and setup of the minimal Debian install went very smoothly. In under two hours I had successfully migrated a website. So for the setup part I am totally satisfied, let’s see how the availability part will develop.

During the upgrade from Etch to Lenny I was surprised that the Gallery2 package was not available for the current stable release of Debian. At first it was no problem, but the Gallery2 package of old stable Etch is to old for the most recent WPG2 plug-in for Wordpress, so I had to upgrade Gallery2 using a upstream version as one of the package maintainers made clear:

“Gallery2 is not available in Lenny due to the large amount of differences between the previous version and 2.3-1 from unstable. The release team decided not to include Gallery2 in stable due to this disruptive change late in the release process. The gallery2 package from sid can be installed via pinning.”

I’ve documented the steps I took for upgrading Gallery2.

1. Create to following file if it not exists:

2. Add the following lines:

* If you are using testing Debian make sure testing is the bigger number.
* This file will install only from the highest pin but it will show you if the packages is available in testing or unstable.

3. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following lines:

4. Update the apt database and upgrade the gallery2 package:

You’ll notice that the package will be kept back. Issue a dist-upgrade to install the upstream package.

Restart apache and as soon as you visit the gallery2 site you’ll be asked to start the upgrade process, which went very smoothly.

This guide will help you setup Firefly Media Server to serve iTunes. This server based program, previously known as “mt-daapd” shares your media collection to iTunes. DAAP stands for Digital Audio Access Protocol and is developed by Apple to share media across a local network.

I have done the installation on Debian Lenny, but Firefly (still called mt-daapd on the Debian repository!) is even available on Windows. In order to publish the firefly shared library on the network I have used Avahi, which is a free implementation of Zeroconf including mDNS/DNS-SD.

1. Install the needed packages including dependencies

2. Setup Avahi by creating /etc/avahi/services/mt-daapd.service

3. Restart the Avahi daemon

4. Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf. The following variables where important to me:

5. Restart mt-daapd

The first time you start mt-daapd it will do a full scan to update the mt-daapd database. Watch the /var/log/daemon.log file to see when it’s ready.

Now you should be able to connect to the mt-daapd admin webinterface at http://yourservername:3689.

6. You’re done!
Fire up iTunes and you’ll see the just created Firefly library become available under Shared. You can also use this service with Rhythmbox Music Player, XMMS with the DAAP plugin, or any other DAAP compatible music player.

No, it’s not another Apple app, it’s an handy tool that comes with the Cyrus mailserver package to delete mail from IMAP mailboxes. I have setup two entries to get rid of unnecessary messages from the spam and trash folders for all users.
The following rules have been added to the EVENTS list on /etc/cyrus.conf.

# purge trash messages older than 2 weeks

purgetrash      cmd="/usr/sbin/ipurge -X -d 14 -f user.*.Trash" at=0600

# purge spam messages older than 4 weeks

purgetrash      cmd="/usr/sbin/ipurge -X -d 28 -f user.*.Spam" at=0630

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It took me some time to figure out the correct matching pattern and at first I was a little bit scared to use the -f option. The man page for ipurge says “-f        Force deletion of mail in all mailboxes.” But you’ll need it, without it won’t work.
I like this way of cleaning up!