It has taken me a couple of days to get back to this due to illness and other priorities (I know what kind of nerd am I when I allow other things to take priority). Anyway, I was left trying to discover a way to use the automatic recovery process with a backup file that was on a hard disk and not a virtual disk.
The approach that I finally took was that I just restored a new Windows Server 2003 image, shared the drive that had the back up and copied the back up to a virtual drive. I did not want to do a normal restore from the backup because I wanted to make sure that I restored the system state and all that as well. So I changed the virtual server's bios to boot off of a CD and started the install again though this time I was able to go through the normal restore process and find the backup. The problem that I ran into next was that somehow my backup file became corrupted and I kept getting the message that there are miscelaneous characters in the back file and the process could not proceed (or something to that effect). So I was left with rebuilding the server from scratch. Luckily all the important data was stored on a secondary drive and was not lost.
My next venture that I started was to create a new Ubuntu Server from scratch. I am not a Linux expert and it has been a very long time since I went through my Linux courses in college so this will be an experience.
So I downloaded the Ubuntu Server ISO from ubuntu.com. Once it was fully downloaded I then created a small 8gb virtual machine and started it using the ISO as the cd drive. The install went very smooth. No errors or questions that I did not know the answer to.
Next you will see what a Windows tool I am. I got done with the install and the server was just staring at me with a command prompt. I felt very out of my element so I jumped on-line to find out how to launch one of the GUIs that I am sure is available for it. There is a GNOME and a KDE interface available though there seemed to be some concern with security holes when using these. now this is just a play environment so I am not as concerned about security since it will not be outside of my firewall though I decided to follow the advice of many and not load a GUI. I did find quite a few people recommending a website called webmin. Being a web developer, my interest was piqued. I did a search and found a post that someone provided on how to install Webmin (click here). The instructions were great. I did not have any issues and everything installed with out any issues, which is impressive since I really do not know what I am doing in Linux (I know a few things but it has been a long while).
Now that this piece was done I needed to setup the server so that the IP address was not determined by DHCP and that there was an entry in my AD DNS so that I could easily get to the website without having to remember the IP address. I found a good tutorial on how to edit the IP address information (click here). Then I added the CName reference in DNS on my AD server. I then browsed to the website for teh first time and was pretty impressed by what this admin application offered. They were not boasting when they said that there was no need for a GUI and anything you needed to do from a visual perspective was handled by this app. I know that all the hard-core Linux persons probably would not look at this since they love their console, though for me this was a wonderful compromise. Now the default theme was not to my liking though I did find one that I did like and went with that.
My next eperiament is to try to install a new web application that I have recently become aware of that looks very interesting. The application is an open source portal called Liferay. I saw a demo of it the other day and was very impressed by what it can do.
As is my want for most new installs I went on-line and found a website that had some instructions on how to install Liferay on a Ubuntu server (click here). In the instructions they have a shell script that you can download and run. I downloaded it and then uploaded it to the server via my Webmin site, configured it to run as an app and then executed it.
One of the steps in the process involved installing Postfix. This is a mail handling application. I was not sure what some of the options were. I did a search on-line and that did not help much so I kind of guessed. I have an Exchange 2003 environment on my small business server and I wanted to link this up to that. So I selected the "Internet with Smart Host" option which then prompted me to enter the domain and SMTP info for my email server (I am assuming that I selected the right option since based upon these options). So far no errors.
Next I went through the steps to download the files and setup mysql in preperation for the liferay install. No issues with any of those steps thoughI came to find out that the base Ubuntu install does not have a the "unzip" utility installed. Not a big problem. Once I installed it I did not have any issues.
I completed everything in the script and then I switched back to my admin account (it is not good to do too mcuh with the root account) and disabled my root account again.
There were a few more steps on the instructions that needed to be followed after the script was completed. I got to the point where it was time to start the liferay web application and I get an error telling me that I need to set either the JAVA_HOME or JRE_HOME environment variables in order to run this program. I added the entry into the files ~/.bashrc, /etc/bash.bashrc, ~/.profile for the root user as well as my admin account and the process still would not start. I then added the JAVA_HOME entry from the instructions into the start.sh script (which I know is not optimal) and the process started. I am not sure what I was doing wrong though it is working now.
Well, something went wrong. The liferay page displayed once, but is no longer displaying. I am getting a PHP error. I will revisit this later when I have time.
