My server project is in place for two reasons: To show i have experience in working with Linux Operating Systems in a professional sense and to provide a secure, bespoke server for my friends and family to make use of, either for backing up their work, creating their own WordPress blog, sending and receiving spam-free emails or even making use of a complete Linux Operating System offering web, database and J2EE servers allowing for development of prototype web sites to building kernels or native C/C++/C#/Java applications.
The server is based on Ubuntu 12.04 server, and as you will read in my first blog entry, is already quite well developed.
First day of installing and configuring the server was relatively painless. The computer has ample storage over its three drives and as such is divided nicely between them to offer good performance, storage and backup facilities.
I created a simple wrapper script for creating new user accounts which automatically generates seperate random 8 digit passwords (Upper and lower case characters and digits) for both Linux and MySQL user accounts, creates a home directory structure from a modified /etc/skel folder (which provides READMEs and the user's web root folder) and sets up Apache web server with a virtual host to handle subdomains of mysite.dev (e.g. morgan.mysite.dev)
If anything, I'm going to alter the length of passwords to 12 characters minimum as testing had shown modern processors could take between 13 hours and 21 days to crack 8 digit random passwords, which sounds a lot but under distributed processing is practically nothing.
I installed two new features today: WordPress and postfix, the first went well, the later, less-so. Honestly, I'm not too worried about Postfix for now and I fell well and truly in love with WordPress the minute I set it up. It's so easy!
First thing I did was create a two-column layout for WordPress blog content, a design idea which I know is very controversial but I actually like. It's a test for my site so I'll probably end up providing the feature as a seperate theme as opposed to pressing it into the TwentyEleven theme.
I'll still use my static format for my portfolio site since I've not only spent a lot of time on the site, but I'm also working on my own blogging engine which I hope to release next year (it's still way off, considering all the other stuff I'm working on, although its development has created some new features which I will be putting up soon.