How not knowing enough leads to drastic solutions

[Joss]

There are days where I get a huge great, miserable reminder than I am a composer/writer/advertising bloke, and not a sysadmin, coder or expert anything.

Warning: if some bright spark has a solution for this, don't tell me - its too late.

Having had a couple of odd problems I decided that I really ought to update php on my little Ubuntu dev box. It is 12.04 with Webmin installed.

Turns out that this is not very easy to do - generally, the Ubuntu repositories only let you install the php that comes with your distribution - 12.04 only comes with 5.3.

However, I found a neat little tutorial that added a repository so that you can upgrade - it is maintained by some of the debian folk.

So, I went and did that. 

Trouble is, it also went and updated Apache to 2.4 (much to my surprise) and everything went wrong.

First of all, Apache wouldn't start. It was complaining about everything. 

I spent 2 hours reading posts from everywhere and nothing worked.

So, I uninstalled it, purged it and reinstalled it.

Yep, it started!

Except now, it would not recognise ANY of the virtual hosts.

I started reading again. I tried creating new hosts in Virtualmin, but Apache did not want to know. I tried manually - still not interested. I read every post out there and tried every trick - but the things they said would be definitely wrong were fine, except the working thing.

I tried a couple of other things which included restarting apache.

Guess what?

It wouldn't start again - gave off the same errors.

I had backed up all my sites with Virtualmin, so I tried restoring them to see if I could force it to work.

Nothing.

So, I have found myself staring at a development server that isn't - serving that is.

And, what is more, my meagre knowledge has simply run out, as has my patience.

So, I have just double backed up everything - files, MySQL and the rest and I have just downloaded a new ISO of Ubuntu.

And with that, I am going to reinstall the entire thing, format all the crap away into PBS Telethon, sort out some partitioning woes I had in the process (my old boot partition was too small, really) and start from scratch.

It is not clever, it is not educational and it is a sledgehammer solution - but when you are not the Demon Sysadmin of Fleet Street, sledgehammers might be all you have left.

[OrganizedFellow]

I too have been in your shoes.

My problem originated with Arch. While I totally loved it, the environment leaves much more to be desired.

I was always tinkering, hacking dot_files to do something cool with my setup and make it different from all the others I had ever seen. While my dev server was working 100% as I liked, I ended up breaking something. And with so many edits and file changes, it was next to impossible to figure out where I had gone wrong.

I left Arch for pure Debian and had encountered some troubles while setting up virtualhosts.

Being the ever-non-ending-tinkererer that I am, I chose Crunchbang.

I COULDNT BE HAPPIER!!!

I was so delighted to see that while setting up, an option prompted me [Yes/No] Would you like to install LAMP?

Or something to that effect. So I joyously chose Yes, and by the time I was done, I had my LAMP server running on a fresh Crunchbang install.

All I had to do was read a little more online on how to set up my virtualhosts.

BADDABING-BADDABANG, and I was in business.

$ git pull remote ... .. .

And I copied over some stuff from my backed up flash drive.

[Joss]

Well, I am eventually up and running, I hope.

The result of my labours is here:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/7890-tutorial-setting-up-an-ubuntu-dev-server-with-virtualmin/

[clsource]

This is a very good newsletter  I think

https://serversforhackers.com/