...are the things you say when screaming at your monitor when young ears are in the next room. Yes, it's silly. What's even more silly is the smelly mess on the floor that I call Apache 2.2.
I do recognize that this here free thing "powers half the internet". I also realize that George Bush is the president. Some things you are powerless over even if the constitution says otherwise.
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Zack Owens in cracking his knuckles... ready to fire off a flame at Rob's off-topic Bush/Apache reference... but Rob ducks! Swooshes and sliiiiiides over the to corner, putting on his best smile: "I'm only here to talk about Apache maaannnnn. Just chiiiiilllll..."
LinqUx and Other Bad Ideas
So today I had the bright idea of doing something clever with LINQ, Mono, Apache and Rails (eLMAR if you will) and so the first step was to install Ubuntu on Virtual Server 2005. That was ridiculously simple believe it or not - I had expected to find myself in a big fat quagmire with lots of casualties and no ability to answer for the loss of lives along the way. I'll let Dick Cheney explain more about what I mean ....
Zack - dude I didn't mean that. I'll stop here - I promise. You have to admit that video is a little on the money though...
So my virtual server is all kicked up and happy, and I'm tootling away crampily on the command line trying to remember HTF to use emacs to edit that damned httpd.config file when it hits me:
I'm out of coffee, I'm hungry, tired and thirsty and I have no idea WHY I'm trying to figure out what this thing is saying to me, and why I'm being tortured like this... emacs should be named Guantan-
(stop... Rob.... don't do it... please no more political references...). I apologize. I am simply a vessel for my muse, and slavishly bark at it's siren's call...
Anyway... being unable to give up, I finally remember my C- commands and off I go (with some help from Google) and edit up my config file. Within an hour or two I have Rails (almost) running nicely on a Virtual Server using Apache/Ubuntu, which itself is a Guest OS on my box at MaximumASP (thanks Phillip for the tips btw).
Server Bunnies
Lovely feeling this - I have a whole new (virtual) box, and it's Ubuntu Server running on Win2003 Server! Yes Yes Yes I've made lots of VMs here on my dev box, but for some reason the thought never occurred to me to rev a few up on a co-lo. My server is a fertile thing! If I copy the VM, I can rev up a second instance if I like - slick!
The sad part is that I couldn't get anything to work because Apache just wouldn't play ball. It's been a long time (and happy at that) since I've had to work the command line and edit stuff fingers-only, and I suck at it. So as I'm typing away streams of "monkey words" (as my daughter calls them - not swear words mind you, "proxy" swear words) come flying out of my mouth, violating my prime directive (don't sound like an Ape).
This leads me to conclude that, as much as people rip MS apart for some IIS's downfalls - the thing is really easy to use and is pretty damn stable. I wish I could get it to hand off proxy requests without IsapiRewrite ... but oh well.
Moral of the story: give IIS a hug tomorrow.
So I'm really close - I just can't get the proxy bits to route to Mongrel properly. If anyone out there has a nice *NIX image they want to share with MySQL/Rails etc. configured, lemme know! I have a fun post in the queue here and I'd love for it to stop smellin up my office floor...
