Project - 3/31/08

I've set up the server today. It is currently an old IBM ThinkPad laptop, equipped with stock Pentium 333Mhz processor and probably 64 MB of RAM. The hard drive is relatively small, and was swapped out with another laptop, but is approximately 4.6 GB, large enough for a web-server.
I installed Ubuntu Linux, Server Edition, version 7.10 - Codename: Gutsy Gibbon. Upon installation, I installed the Apache2 webserver program, via the built-in installer [apt-get install apache2] - This automatically downloaded, installed, and configured the application. Following this, I setup the network interface card (NIC), which is an external PCMCIA Xircom 10/100 Ethernet Card. To do so, I needed to edit the network interface configuration file, /etc/network/interfaces. I added the lines:

#The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dchp


These lines will automatically initiate, load, and obtain an IP address from the router, through the DHCP protocol.

Following this, I proceeded to install a SQL server. Specifically, I chose the open-source MySQL database server because it is the one with which I am most familiar, and also it was a requirement for the MediaWiki wiki software. I installed MySQL via the command [apt-get install myql-server]. During the installation, it prompted me for a password for the root user, which I gave.
Next, I downloaded the MediaWiki software, version 1.12, from the site, http://wikimedia.org, via the command [wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.12/mediawiki-1.12.0.tar.gz]. This downloaded the software into the current directory, /var/www/wiki. I then extracted the files using [tar -cxvf mediawiki-1.12.0.tar.gz].

I've also constructed a small placeholder page using HTML to place as the temporary index page on the site. This is named index.html and placed in the /var/www folder, so it will be automatically displayed when the site is queried.

To install the wiki software, one must navigate to the folder via a web browser. So, I browsed over to the server, 192.168.1.104 on my internal network, and went to the subfolder /wiki. Lo and behold, the page attempts to download because it cannot yet display php files as a page.
So, I attempted to install the php5-common and libapachephp5 packages using the aptitude installer, which I did. I then moved the php5.conf and php5.load modules from /etc/apache2/mods-available to the /etc/apache2/mods-available folder, and restarted apache2. This should reload the webserver, which should have loaded the PHP5 protocols for displaying php pages, however that didn't solve anything yet. So I checked the apache2 configuration file, though that didn't help, or provide me with any clue as to a solution. I'll continue trouble-shooting another time.