So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.
As is the beauty of a virtual server, with the click of a mouse I had a clean Dapper Drake install to start with. Rather than install nginx from source, I decided to upgrade to Feisty Fawn and install via apt. This means losing the long term support of Dapper but, hey, its my server and I’ll just have to upgrade again when necessary. From there, getting an nginx, mysql, Rails and PHP setup is well documented, on top of which I added an init script for FastCGI.
Then things started to get a little tricky. Our blogs use clean URLs for both WordPress and Gallery2 but these generate rewrite rules for Apache’s mod_rewrite. Translating these to nginx for WordPress is fairly straightforward but, despite many wasted hours, I’ve failed to get Gallery working correctly. The problem appears to be that nginx URL encodes when rewriting from the path to parameters and Gallery doesn’t seem to handle this well. Anyway, in the end I’ve gone ahead with the move but with Gallery rewrites turned off.
I’ve also switched to using SliceHost’s nameservers for one of the domains. The other is still stuck with PlusNet as the nameserver as the registrar (123-reg) returns an error when I try and update the settings.
If you can see this post then all of the important bits are working though!
Turns out 123-Reg aren’t actually the registrar for that domain any more which explains why I couldn’t change the nameservers with them! That just leaves the question of why it appears in their control panel.