Last night, I reinstalled Apache and Perl, and did a 127.0.0.1 loopback test in MSIE -- it came up with the Apache "yay it worked" page! Except ... I don't know where it's coming from. I set it up (or thought I did) so that "domainname/index.html" reads from "F:/_httphome/www/index.html", but I already modified that file to look a little different, and the one that came up was the original!

I even did a search on my PC, but couldn't locate the original file being read! D'oh! Anyway, my DNS hasn't updated yet (typically takes 1-3 days, they say), so I can't test by using domainname yet.

Oh well, more tinkering this weekend.

(Warning: for the next little while, many of my posts will be detailing the move from Blogger towards a webserver and Movable Type.)

I found this great site www.dslwebserver.com/, which details specific steps on how to set up your own webserver. Most of the examples are with particular businesses (www.zoneedit.com, for example), but the instructions are still very very useful.

So far, I have signed up for a free trial through ZoneEdit (for DNS services) and switched my DNS servers over from DotEasy to ZoneEdit. I'm a little concerned that switching the web hosting over to be handled by ZoneEdit will also mess up the POPmail/webmail that I'm enjoying with DotEasy -- that is non-negotiable because my NPG colleagues depend on that service.

I also found another distribution of Perl from ActiveState, which seems to be geared towards a Windows UI. But the Win32 perl I have right now says its source code is from ActiveState anyway, so I think I'll stay the course.

Consider two people, A and B, living in two different cities, where A is north of B. They're talking, and B invites A over to his place.

"If you get a chance, you should come up here sometime!"

But B is south of A! Should he not have asked A to "come down here" instead? In my reference basis, north consititutes "up" and south is "down" ... like you're holding a map (right-side up). And yet, I so often here people use "come up here", where "up" refers to their own location or city. Perhaps it's a subconscious instinct for people to assume that wherever they are is up or higher than wherever else.

Net-not-working

Here's how my network setup is right now. My domain is registered and hosted at doteasy.com and I have POP mail and webmail handled there. Other people use those emails, so I don't want them on my PC, but now I do want all the HTTP stuff on my home PC.

I have Dynamic DNS at www.dyndns.org pointing "myname.homeip.net" to my router (which updates my DDNS if my IP ever changes). So I told doteasy to point my domain traffic to "myname.homeip.net", which was the quickest and dirtiest way I could think of for now. My router/firewall routes non-standard ftpport to my PC for FTP purposes. Port 80 (standard http) is supposed to be routed to my PC too, but seems to get ignored instead.

So how do I get this setup to be nice and clean (and working)??

Not having fun. (But it was cool to be going through a .conf file and making manual adjustments again ... sure missed that from back in the Unix days!)

This is just tiring.

I just spent the past 35 minutes cutting and pasting past comments into XLS to start preserving them, in prep for MySQL database. And I'm only at mid-May. Wish there was a better (and more accurate) way, ugh.

So I tried installing Apache 2.0 and then Win32Perl, and got myself all confused, because I ended up with two copies of Apache in there! The Win32Perl bin executable seems to have both Perl 5.6.1 and Apache 1.3.27 in it already, which I got from here!

"Installation" is merely an unpacking of the libraries and files it comes with; I didn't see any interaction with the registry (but I could have missed it). I'm going to uninstall it all again tonight, and then try it all over again. My planned approach is to:

1. install Win32 bin package (Perl 5.6.1, Apache 1.3.27)
2. configure Apache
3. configure Perl
4. fail at each step above, get frustrated
5. skim the manuals / readme files
6. call Mike for assistance
7. quit for the evening and watch Futurama

Looks like I have my work cut out for me! Any pointers before I start tugging my hair (what little I have left) out?

Congratulations to Arnold as governor elect.

Can't say I didn't expect it, but I am somewhat surprised still to see it happen. But most of all, I am disappointed that the people of California would be swayed enough by his public image to have this happen. That said, wasn't this already predicted as a stepping stone to his presidential victory in "Demolition Man"?