Tim Child

I have been looking at how I backup my data at home, and one thing that always comes to mind is how to get these backups of site, and preferrably into a different geographical area easily.

Well Amazon S3 storage was always on my mind, but recently Dreamhost have gone crazy with their storage offerings.  I know have over 400Gb of space with over 4Tb of transfer for a small outlay each month.

A cost comparison has been done here by Joseph Scott showing how the two compare:

http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2006/10/03/amazon-s3-vs-dreamhost/

I am going to be looking at implementing something with Dreamhost I think, I am not a major corporation, I am a home user with some data so I think Dreamhost will be fine.

Bacula and Backuppc are two projects that run on Debian that I will be checking out, and first and foremost I want to make sure that my data is encrypted quite strongly.  Though I am probably going to put up my photo archive just as is, to have easy access when needed.  More posts to come on this.

Along time ago I wrote a list of things that I need to complete, well I have managed to get one thing done on the list, and that was a site I was building for a friend.  Its almost complete from his designs, though I have yet to get feedback.  The site is in Norwegian, for a Norwegain company and it is:

http://www.nord-vesteiendom.as/

Its a really simple site on the outside, showcasing new house builds, and all the import information will be uploaded in PDFs shortly.  As normal I built the whole thing on top of WordPress 2, with a custom template which actually contains quite a bit more custom PHP than the simplicity of the site actually reveals.  But WordPress lets anyone update the site, add in pictures which are formatted properly and then attach PDFs.

I will be of course putting in more information about the build in my portfolio site.  Now on to build http://jeanettemagnussen.com

One thing that I feel is harder than it should be with django is getting it working with Apache2. Sure the built in webserver is nice for development, but there comes a time when you need to step up and use a webserver for development that you can also deploy the site upon.

I have used Apache a lot in the past, but recently I have decided to move over to installing everything the Debian way, and this will reflect that. I am going to use python2.3, Apache2 and the version of mod_python that is in stable. You can follow the instructions if you have installed Apache2 and mod_python in otherways after this step if you wish.
To get Apache2 on debian with mod_python, simply:

1. apt-get install apache2
2. apt-get install libapache2-mod-python

For the rest of the tutorial, I am assuming that you have Django setup correctly, and working with your database. If not, I recommend installing the development version. It is easy to update using svn and there are some features that are better than the stable version I find. Once you have done this you can start to build your site. From then on you can create your apache virtualhost file:

I have decided to run my django site on a different port, but of course you can run it on different ipaddresses, and with different hostheaders. All you need to do is follow the apache 2 documentation for this. I feel this is already well documented so I will just show how I did it by running on different ports:

1. Edit the ports file for apache2 to tell it to listen on more than one port:
   vi /etc/apache2/ports.conf
2. Add this line to tell it to listen on port 8000:
   Listen 8000
3. Create a new sites file for this new virtual host:
   vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/djangosite
4. Now we need to put in the configuration details:

   
   
   
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
   PythonPath "['/home/tim/dev/projects/'] + sys.path"
   SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE djangosite.settings
   PythonDebug On
   
   
   Alias /media "/var/www/djangosite/media"
   
   SetHandler None
   
   
   
   SetHandler None
   
   
   
   

   This gives us several things:

   • Sets up a virtualhost to listen on port 8000.
   • For the virtual host use mod_python.
   • PythonHandler is told to use Django.
   • Our PythonPath is updated with our site files, in my case my django projects are located in /home/tim/dev/projects/ so this is what I use. Point this to where your django files are kept.
   • Let django know to use the settings file for this project
   • The we setup an alias to serve the media files, as they don’t need to be served through mod_python we turn the handler off for the /media/ location. I will setup my media files in /var/www/djangosite/media
   • Finally tell apache2 not to use mod_python to serve image files.

5. Now save this file, and enable the site:
   a2ensite djangosite
6. Now create the webhosting directory, and the symbolic link for the admin directory, and check the permissions:

   mkdir /var/www/djangosite/
   cd /var/www/djangosite/
   ln -s /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/
   chmod -R 755 /var/www/djangosite
   

7. The stop and start apache2 on your server (this is for Debian using init.d scripts, but whatever you do stopping then starting is better than a simple reload).
   /etc/init.d/apache2 stop; /etc/init.d/apache2 start

Once you have done that, check your site by point a webbrowser to the the machine that you have apache2 running on, but at port 8000 for instance if it is a localhost, tryhttp://127.0.0.1:8000.

One thing that I haven’t talked about is where it is best to place all the files used in creating a django site, and I have yet to read any documentation about this. This is why in the above I am point it to a dev subdirectory from my home directory. I don’t think this is a good idea for a production site, and perhaps it should go in somewhere off /var.

One thing is for sure, creating seperate directories for media and the actual files is a good idea, and you if you follow the django instructions you can take them up on the recommendation of using a seperate lightweight webserver to just serve these files.

I have been using hellahella using paster serve and I must say the performance was terrible. I don’t think that it is mean’t to be run for any length of time which is at odds with hellahella, the web interface to hellanzb, which is.

I have documented before that I am using hellanzb to manage my nzb files, and hellahella makes it even easier and with integration with http://www.newzbin.com it is even better (how about one click downloads, unrar, par, and ready to view – yes I have it!)

So I wanted to run hellahella using Apache2 on my Debian box. Luckly just as I wanted to do this a new FAQ was put up on the Pylons web site on how to achieve this using mod_python (which I also wanted to use). Pylons is a web framework for python and it seems quite good too and I got alot of help from the very helpful pylons-discuss group on groups.google.com.
So I setup Apache2 or rather Debian did using apt-get, and I got a fairly normal install. If you haven’t used version2 of apache before the configuration has changed somewhat and all the config files are now split. At the same time I also installed mod_python using apt-get and as this is rather well documented I am not going to write it down here. Now all we need do is follow the first part of the instructions on the Pylons site:

1. Install hellahella (I assume you are running hellanzb already otherwise go and download and install it) and make sure it works with paster serve hella.ini
2. Make sure mod_python is installed and enabled.
3. Save the http://projects.amor.org/misc/svn/modpython_gateway.py script as wsgi.py in your mod_python python directory which is /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mod_python/ on my system.
4. Create a project directory. I used /www/hellahella
5. Create startup.py file in this directory with the following information:from paste.deploy import loadapp
   app = loadapp(“config:/www/hellahella/hella.ini”)
6. Create a link to your hella.ini file: ln -s /etc/hella.ini hella.ini
7. Go into your apache2 sites directory: cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
8. Create a new site: vi hellahellaSite
9. And input the following information:
   

   VirtualHost 127.0.0.1
   ServerAdmin tim@timc3.com
   DocumentRoot /www/hellahella/
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler mod_python.wsgi
   PythonPath "['/www/hellahella/'] + sys.path"
   PythonOption wsgi.application startup::app
   PythonOption SCRIPT_NAME /
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
   Alias /stylesheets/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/stylesheets/"
   Alias /javascripts/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/javascripts/"
   Alias /images/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/images/"
   LogLevel warn
   CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
   /VirtualHost

10. Remember to change the ipaddress 127.0.0.1 to whatever ipaddress or domain name you need.
11. The to a level above your doc root: cd /www
12. Then create a link from the public media files for hellahella to a directory here: ln -s /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/hellahella-0.1dev_r782-py2.3.egg/hellahella/public
13. Rename public: mv public hellahellaMedia
14. You might need to chgrp and chown the files under this directory.
15. Then enable this site: a2ensite hellahellaSite
16. Restart apache2: /etc/init.d/apache2 stop; /etc/init.d/apache2 start
17. Then test.
18. And it should work aslong as hellanzb.py is running and hellahella is setup correctly.