Q&A
Q&A with InetD: Answers to Computer, Internet, Networking and Telecom questions from our reader’s e-mails and comments.
Many years ago, I created an online form (Ask InetDaemon) through which my loyal and curious readers can send me an e-mail with a question about a tutorial or other subjects. Replying to the e-mail helped the person who sent me the e-mail, but the questions are often quite good and serve as a great basis of writing a tutorial, but unless I wrote a tutorial page, there was no way to share it with my readers.
Now that I have a blog, I can actually reply to these e-mails in a more public forum where they will help more than just one person. The “Ask InetDaemon” category will contain those answers. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the category to see new questions and my answers.
The “Ask InetDaemon” blog category will be reserved for the e-mails I answer. I’m going to try to answer one question every two weeks on Friday evenings for your Saturday morning amusement.
However, you have to do your part:
First, you have to send me some real questions via the online form. I don’t promise to answer them all and I can’t do your school work for you.
Second, if you want to comment on my responses to any of the e-mails in this category, you need to register for a free InetDaemon.Com account. Only registered members can comment on my posts.
Stay Tuned!
Servers are computers that host services. One type of server is a web server. When developing a website, it is often handy to have a second web server on which you can test new ideas without causing the real website (the production site) to crash or have problems. This second server is called a ‘development’ server.
I recently finished setting up a development web server to host WordPress. I already had a development web server with a copy of my website’s static web pages at home. I use this development web server to test out ideas for the layout and design of the InetDaemon.Com website. I also use the development server to test Server Side Includes and new Perl scripts without breaking the live website you’re currently reading in your web browser.
My ‘production’ website has hundreds of static web pages (the Tutorials), which are served by an Apache web server running on a UNIX based computer. The rest of my website is the blog, which is handled by WordPress, a PHP-based CGI application that dynamically loads content from a MySQL database and turns it into dynamic web pages. If the name of the web page you’re reading ends in .php, it’s a safe bet it’s being rendered by WordPress.
My development web server is a Microsoft IIS web server running on Windows XP, which makes it a very different platform from my live site. Why did I choose IIS for the local server? Simply for the challenge. Since I already had IIS running, and I had also configured it to have a cgi-bin folder where I test out my Perl scripts I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to get a WordPress site up and running on it. Getting my local IIS web server running was simple. Getting WordPress running took just a little extra work.
First, to run WordPress on a Microsoft IIS server, you must have IIS installed before you install anything else. Next I installed MySQL, a database server application. Next, I downloaded the latest version of PHP (the script engine that parses the PHP language that WordPress is written in). I installed PHP with ISAPI option for IIS and the MySQL extensions enabled. Finally, I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, copied it to the same folder location on my local webserver as it is on my public website and then ran the WordPress install.
That’s all it took.
Now I have a server at home that delivers exactly the same pages as the production InetDaemon.Com website, looks the same and feels the same when you browse it, but has IIS as the web server instead of Apache.
If I ever get around to writing up a more specific set of steps, I’ll post it online as a tutorial.
I’ve updated the computer and hardware tutorial sections, mostly to fix broken links and to update the content for MacOS and a few other things.
I wrote a Perl CGI script that handles the hyperlinks to the previous and next pages in every tutorial page in each section of this website (for the Internet, Telecom, Computer tutorials etc.). I’ve been trying to fix the darn thing, and I keep getting closer to a solution, but other problems keep popping up. At first, the main page for each section kept linking back to itself. I fixed that, only to reveal that the pages didn’t link in the order I wanted. So, I created a file to tell the script what order the pages should be in. Then I remembered just how many sections there are in this site!! (Think: hundreds).
So, I modified the script to create the files with the pages in alphabetical order. Now I don’t have to create hundreds of pages, but I still have to go back and edit them into logical order.
Please bear with me while I work to untangle this twisted skein of Perl..