Well that was what I thought at the time. I have spend at least 2 days fixing my webserver after I broke it by running a few updates. I don’t know what went wrong, but it did and it stuffed the whole thing up – causing me grief in the process.
My webserver is running Fedora Core 1, and i decided to use the Redhat Up2date service, this identified several things that needed updating, so I thought that I would let it happen. I guess under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been a problem, but I had installed some non-fedora rpms that needed all sorts of things updated before they would work, needless to say I forced the updates through and everything worked so I wasn’t all that bothered – that was months ago, so only recently became a problem when I ran the up2date program.
Whilst the server was broken I decided that I would upgrade to Fedora Core 2, so I started a fresh install – great I thought. Well the first problem after using FC2 was not having any networking, so I searched the net for a fix and found it straight away. It turned out that PCMCIA service was starting after the ipstack was brought up, this should have been find, but as there was a bug in the package things didn’t work so well and the ordering of the services needed to be changed. That fixed now to get apache and mail setup.
One of the best tools that I have come across for Linux is a web-based admin application called WebMin (www.webmin.com) I have used if for several years and find to be very good as changing configurations on the Linux platform. It really makes linux simple for beginners. It has several modules available and I came across one called VirtualMin, this module creates Virtual apache domains, sets up BIND DNS and does all the mail user creation stuff as well as setting up MySQL databases and FTP accounts.
On my first attempt with Fedora I decided to use the default sendmail for dealing with email through my server. A friend of mine suggested using Postfix as it is apparently better, so I switched my MTA to Postfix. That was ok, got it configured quite quickly, so was onto the next project.
Using VirtualMin, I started creating the domains, this went very well (as expected) however as soon as I started visiting the sites that I created, I just got the same page. Apache was ignoring the virtual server configurations, I couldn’t figure it out. I was getting nowhere. It was then that I discovered that Postfix was also rejecting all the mail that it was receiving, this wasn’t too good at all.
I spent hours trying to get things working, with headache and tiredness setting in I gave up. I finally decided that I would drop back to FC1 as I know that it works for me and I am not all that bothered about the updates by this time. So thats what I went back to.
On my computer went FC1, WebMin, VirtualMin and ASSP (a mail filtering application). The domains where recreated and everything started working again. Databases restored and mail alias recreated, I am a happy bunny again…. for now anyway.
Back to work tomorrow.