Crazy as a Left Handed Computer

I've been thinking of running a *nix operating system as a server on a machine for sometime but wasn't ready to spend large sums of money on the hardware to run it, fortunately hardware became available at a modest price for the task for an Intel i7 64 bit processor with plenty of processing power, 6GB memory and dual hard disks of 500GB for a RAID1 mirror that turned out to only work as a software mirror, as Ubuntu seemed to have issues with the Intel X58 chipset hardware RAID controller on board. And I also had an issue with the graphic card driver that was solved by installing beta drivers, not an easy task whatsoever taking about 3 hours.

The first issue I had when installing Ubuntu desktop edition was that the standard distribution doesn't offer mirroring out the box, so had to download the alternative distribution Ubuntu OS. This OS distribution wasn't even the latest and was immediately updated by myself via the standard update software centre, which is much like Windows in ease of use. Unfortunately updating all the modules to work with Adobe flash, GD components, MySQL, PHP and compiling development components and compilers wasn't so easy. For the machine to become a useful Apache 2 web server and run other server components as well it required several modules and approximately thirty or so libraries; installation of these and updates of bits and pieces had to be done at the terminal prompt, and it's been quite some time I've used a *nix OS, which took me back more than a few years!

The main reason for running Ubuntu *nix was for running this phpBB forums and remove the limitations of running the forums on a Windows Ultimate client machine, which only has a limited number of supporting http connections in its OS; and I couldn't afford to spend fortunes on a copy of Windows Server OS with client connection limitations, so lots of hard work learning with the freely available Ubuntu *nix distribution solved the expense issue for what is a freely available forum board to the public that I offer on my own hybrid fibre broadband, hardware and freely available software, which is fortunate and I thank those individuals for writing, offering freely available software for people like me to use with the knowledge and willingness to learn quickly in running a service with limited monetary resources. The total hardware cost was £250 in total and lots of learning, fortunately another machine was at hand for picking up distribution, general troubleshooting of the phpBB forums between the two OSes; Windows and Ubuntu *nix.

Another chapter of learning has taken over my life for a few days setting this all up with little downtime, unfortunately I did loose one newly create account in the process of transferring the MySQL database because they jumped in and that account was created whilst I was working on the system, basically as I was working almost live and didn't wish to close down the forums completely during the process, my apologies to that person for having to migrate the MySQL phpBB database from the old system to the new without the ability to keep their account. There was no other lose of data during the migration of the forums to new hardware and completely different OS.

I'll be tackling MySQL master to master replication shortly; between an Ubuntu MySQL and Windows MySQL database server, which will allow the forums to basically have a full live replication of the database. Also I'll have a separate web server to switch in for the forums, so if the Unbunu phpBB Apache server website goes down, it'll only be a matter of switching over to the spare; unfortunately this will need to be done manually on the router, but I do hope this will never need to be done, ha...! It's only a Micky mouse domestic router, so hot router route switching isn't possible with the kit, and I cannot change the router because my contract with my ISP forbids it, which is rather silly.

Been busy over the last couple of days learning about ssl certificate installation on the Apache2 web server that the forum board runs on, and also redirecting all traffic on standard http port 80 to ssl port 443 on crazy as a left handed computer; searching the web seems to always result in a solution that is useful directly or with slight modification to the procedure to get things up and running quickly.

One of the primary reasons for setting up secure socket layer (ssl) on the phpBB forum crazy as a left handed computer was my concerns concerning protecting authentification and registered users information securely, which standard installations don't do without running ssl encryption; even though we don't hold a great deal of personal information concerning our registered users.

And it is surprising that more forum administrators aren't savvy in protecting their registered users information whilst it travels throughout the internet, espectially respectfully in regard to their users using completely public networks like those around town areas in cafes and the abroad or likewise within their own vicinity, that can be sniffed with packet filtering software solutions on these public networks. And if you're paranoid the governments willingness to sniff and compromise internet traffic generally!

Upgraded to Ubuntu release 16.04.01 LTS Server this morning, with only one issue that needed to be fixed for running the phpBB Crazy as a Left Handed Computer board. And that was the downgrade of php7.0 to php5.6, once that was done everything popped back up into life.

Migration to new low power computer hardware for the phpBB forum took place yesterday. The new hardware is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with 1GB of memory. The forum still runs under Ubuntu, but this edition is for the Raspberry Pi 3. Power consumption of the previous hardware was in the order of 90 watts a hour, were with the Raspberry Pi its 1-2 watts a hour, a considerable power saving over a year of 780 Kilowatts; in monitory terms that was about £100 yearly. The yearly cost of running the forum for a year on a Raspberry Pi 3 is £2.

And it is also a great reduction in the cost of the hardware. The last Dell i7 cost £200 secondhand, were as the Raspberry Pi cost totally with a case and micro SD memory card £60 new. A power pack UPS will be added in the next week at a cost of £22 for added security against power failures corrupting the data.

The forum is now available by 2 domain names and it is replicated across the two sites with a master to master MySQL replication for redundancy and manual routed failover for it is only running on a single IPv4 address and SSL certificates are non-unique. https://mental.me.uk is an IPv6 site and https://embleton.me.uk an IPv4 & IPv6 site. What is done on one site will immediately be replicated on the other site and respectfully the other way round.

https://embleton.me.uk IPv4 & IPv6 for the primary.
https://mental.me.uk IPv6 site for the secondary.
https://mental.me.uk:1443 IPv4 for the secondary.

The IPv6 site https://mental.me.uk runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 model B and https://embleton.me.uk runs on a Banana Pi M3.