The Site With the Lamp

July 14, 2008

It's been a couple of weeks since I switched to Debian after being a loyal Fedora/Redhat user for many, many years ago. It hasn't been smooth sailing all together. There were few teething problems here and their.

First up I was looking to install the latest versions of Thunderbird and Firefox and was rather dismayed to find that debian archives only had really really ancient versions on them. I was looking around in third party repositories when I realised that Iceweasel look pretty much like firefox. It turned out to be a case of a rose by another name. (Romeo and Juliet is the only bit of Shakespeare that I can claim to be even vaguely familiar with)

Iceweasel is Firefox and Icedove is thunderbird. The Debian flavors had been given different names apparently because of a copyright dispute with the mozzilla foundation.

Like the web browser, the web server also caused a bit of trouble. Apache 2 wouldn't start.

This error was because the installer had put together apache2 running in MPM mode along with PHP 4. They are not compatible so why wasn't PHP 5 installed? (apache 2 is compatible with PHP, but apache 2 in MPM mode isn't)

After uninstalling PHP4 and installing PHP 5 this particular problem went away. But the webserver still refused to start because it didn't recognize my url rewriting instructions or mod security directives. Never figured out how to enable mod security but mod rewrite can be enabled as:

That doesn't take me out of the woods just yet. None of the sites are functioning, they are all returning 403 forbidden errors. Initially I thought this is because the owner is UID 500 (yours truley on the old fedora core). On this debian box my uid is 1002 (why not 1000? That's another long story)

Anyway, i changed ownership and then changed the group to www-data (they seem to keep changing the group and username. I remeber the days when it used to be nobody:nobody)

Thankfully both my browser and web server seem to be working ok now.