A private BSD laboratory

On the last week-end I decommissioned the Development local area network by migrating the sole machine still working in it to the Phoibos DMZ network, which is now reacheable from the Internet with an high available topology (as explained in the post “Behind an ISA 2006 Array“).

The same BSD installation is still publishing the free Phoibos weblogs collection, empowered by FreeBSD 6.1, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.6, MySQL 5.0 and WordPress 2.0… you are welcome to request your free blog activation!

The new free blogging service, published in the context of the Phoibos project, is based on a FreeBSD system, running in my corporate production network enviroment. Here is a screenshot of the console of this virtual guest machine, showing you the firsts databases containing the posts submitted by hosted users.

The experimental use of WordPress in this free hosting service will allow us to better understand the value of the services which can be empowered by this open source platform.

After I implemented the blogging engine empowering this weblog in my development area, today I wanted to challenge me with the setup of the so-called “unstable” version of the same engine, targeted to blog hosting customers.

At the first I tried to make working the package of WordPress MU fetched from the FreeBSD.org packge collection (which claimed to be the 1.5.1.3 version), but after  lot of troubles, I realized it probably was not the “right” version for me! 😛
So, after a couple of hours spent in the WPMU support forum I decided to try to download the source files straightly from the WordPress website… et voila’: after a few clicks, (and have the DB dropped and re-created)  I am finally able to host as many WordPress blogs as I want! Simply go to the http://weblogs.valsania.it/ to see the result, and… happy blogging! ;)