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- The Post your Own Content link under the tab with my name comes up as "file not found"
The header for the play subdomain had a relative link to "Post Your Own Game," which got interpreted as a page on the play subdomain. That is now replaced with a link to the full URL.
- The Chess on a Really Big Board link that was posted under Whats New does not work. Not sure if it was the wrong link or something with the server move.
The link is fixed. I had forgotten to include the play directory in the URL.
Fergus, I just wanted to point out a couple of bugs that may be around due to the server move.
- The Post your Own Content link under the tab with my name comes up as "file not found"
- The Chess on a Really Big Board link that was posted under Whats New does not work. Not sure if it was the wrong link or something with the server move.
Thanks!
I added an extra space into the sql command in the indexing function table_row, in order to fix an error in the zillions.php pages. It has fixed those pages, and I wouldn't expect an extra whitespace to cause other problems, but I'm making note of it here just in case.
For just a little bit extra each month, I upgraded my hosting package. This site now runs on a VPS with four Xeon cores running at 3.5Ghz each, 8.79 GB of RAM, 196.74 GB of SSD space, and 6.66 TB of bandwidth every month. That's a lot better than what I was getting with my old host, and I have also been learning a lot more about running a Linux server.
So far, I am at an impasse in trying to get the PHP scripts to run with user and group set to chessvariants instead of apache. I have had no luck getting suexec to do the job. So I installed php-fpm, which is supposed to do the job. But the documentation I found is for mod_fastcgi, and I installed mod_proxy_fcgi, which does things differently. It turns out that mod_fastcgi is not in the CentOS 7 repositories, and using it with CentOS 7 is not recommended. I may look into installing mod_lsapi, which is installed at the VPS this site was previously on.
Greg, since the header was more self-contained, I renamed the $group variable it used, and that seems to have fixed the problem.
Ben, I simplified the way sessions are started, no longer using specific names for sessions, and that file hadn't been updated yet. I have now changed how it opens sessions, and it should work now.
Greg, I have traced the problem to a variable name conflict between Game Courier and the header. Both are using the $group variable, and the wrong value for $group causes the value of $set to be set to an empty string.
/indexmaint/modifyitem.php
(specifically, after submitting changes at /indexmaint/edititem.php?itemid=MZpole-chess )
Ben, I need specifics. What is the URL of the page you are not recognized as being logged in on?
Greg, the two things you mentioned are related. For some reason, the value of $set is empty, and because of that, the value of $pieces is empty, and because of that, the piece label in the move is not recognized as a piece label. I'm still trying to figure out what the root cause could be.
I can't edit MS index information, some session problem. I get the message
"You are not logged in as an editor, and cannot make changes here.Session:"
I can however edit (as editor) comments...
Fergus, Can you look at something for me? I'm very confused. I created the preset but I can't move any pieces.
/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DOdyssey%26settings%3Dalfaerie
This preset has no code at all. When I try to move a peice, I get:
"MOVE: P h4-h5 is not a valid expression, because P is not a recognized piece, coordinate, command, or subroutine."
Which is strange because P is certainly a piece. Seems to give the error with any piece. This piece set does have some two-letter pieces, but plenty of sets have that without issue.
Something else that is strange, that I'm guessing is unrelated, whenever you go to edit this preset, the Set is not selected in the drop-down. Actually, the drop-down isn't populated with values at all. You need to change set group and change it back to All to get the set drop-down to populate. Then you need to pick the set again (in this case, Alfaerie for Odyssey. It occured to me that it could be something I did wrong updating the sets.php, but I don't think so. I looked carefully and I've done this several times now without issue.
I just changed its permissions from 0755 to 0775, which should allow members of the chessvariants group (which includes apache) to write in it. Try it again and let me know if it works.
Looks like we can't create new presets:
Failed to create the directory /home/chessvariants/public_html/play/pbmsettings/odyssey
Probably need to change the security on the pbmsettings directory
FTP is now available, though I do recommend using SCP or SFTP if one of those is available. Other than using port 21, the same details for logging onto SCP or SFTP will work with FTP.
I have just sent userids and passwords to you, Ben, and Joe.
chmod -R 0775 */*.bak worked, because I previously put apache in the chessvariants group. But there is still the annoyance that new backup logs would belong to apache, and my blog needs the correct user and group to update Wordpress. So I'm still going to look into suexec further.
It turns out that using User and Group to change the server's user and group to something other than apache disables sessions. Fortunately, it was apache throughout the night.
Thinking about this, there might be an easier way to attack the problem. If the problem is that the log files can't be overwritten because of the process trying to do it, rather than trying to run the process as a different user, you can probably just change the permissions on the files. Something like:
chmod -R o+w *
run from the root directory of the files you want to change. This won't change new files, but I think changing the permissions on the folder changes the permissions on new files that are created within.
I have been looking into what should be the simplest fix of all, using SuexecUserGroup to change the user and group of the PHP process from apache to the user and group of the script, but it is not working yet. In the meantime, I have set the server's user and group to chessvariants with the User and Group commands. But this affects my other sites on the same server, and Wordpress needs to use its own user and group to update plug-ins. So I'm going to look further into how to get suexec working.
OpenLiteSpeed is a web server, which is the same kind of thing as apache. It is supposed to be faster, which may be a reason to switch over to it, but for now I'm looking to see if I can solve my original problem within apache. I'm considering creating a separate subdomain for images that would be handled by OpenLiteSpeed, because it is supposed to be a lot faster for static content. The subdomain would probably be called img.chessvariants.com.
I installed OpenLiteSpeed instead of NGINX, but it looks like I'll have to learn to configure it, since PHP still runs with the user apache.
There might be some more downtime. A problem that has come up on this new server is that PHP runs as the user apache instead of as the user chessvariants. This has kept it from overwriting old backup copies of Game Courier logs. I temporarily got it to make backups of logs by changing the file extension of backups from .bak to .bck, but the new files belong to apache instead of to chessvariants.
Looking into solutions to this, I may want to replace apache with something called NGINX. If I do this, all the virtual hosts I created with apache will go away, and I will have to recreate virtual hosts with NGINX. During that time, the site would not be available.
Play.chessvariants.com is now on the American server, and I successfully moved in a game with Game Courier. It failed to make a backup, but I hope I have fixed this by adding a chmod command before backing up the log.
I'm not sure what's going on, but play.chessvariants.com is still loading its content from the British server. I expect it is just a matter of time before everything is fully coming from the American server.
Success! The Chess Variant Pages have moved to a new server, and this one is back in the United States.
I think things are ready to go. I have been testing a copy of the website out on subdomains of duniho.org, and I have SSI, PHP, MariaDB (a MySQL replacement), and RedirectEngine all working. Since I will have only one IP address, I am using an independent DNS service instead of hosting my own nameservers. During the move, I am going to disable logging in, so that no one can add new content to the site while the move is underway. During this time, I will copy over an up-to-date copy of the website and the database.
Oh well. Yeah, those all sound like good reasons - particuarly subdomains. We kinda need that.
After looking it over, I think I'll pass on it. Although it would be cool to use something by a fellow CV inventor, it is not actively supported, it lacks DNSSEC, which he says is important for security but which he doesn't have the time to add to MaraDNS, I didn't find documentation on how to handle subdomains, and it is not widely used. Since I'm only just learning about DNS, I may just use BIND, which is already available through webmin.
Yeah, I knew Sam had a DNS program. Good to see it's still available. It would be great if we could use it. I'm sure Sam would help us if we ran into trouble.
While reviewing available DNS programs, I found one created by Sam Trenholme called MaraDNS. It's on the same website he was using to host ChessV. If it's suitable, I thought it would cool to use that one, though I suppose the people providing tech support at my host will be unfamiliar with it.
Yes, MariaDB is at least a marginal improvement on MySQL, and it's truly "open" so I think the chances are good that it will widen the gap over time. Now that Oracle owns MySQL, some are concerned about it being taken in directions that benefit Orace at the expense of the interest of their users. If this happens, the differences between MySQL and Maria will continue to increase, so it's probably best to do a migration earlier rather than later.
Since I'm not allowed to give root access to anyone else, I'll have to do much of it on my own, but I'll let you know if you can help. I'm working with CentOS 7, I just got webmin working with it, and I plan to get some DNS stuff going tomorrow. I was previously on CentOS 6, which was by mistake, since I had chosen 7. I then started over with CentOS 7, because that is what my present VPS is using, and I thought greater similarity with it would help. Also, I was having trouble getting MySQL and SSI to work. Since I'm doing this from scratch, and I have looked at articles on what to do after installing CentOS 7, I am looking into something called MariaDB. This is an opensource fork of MySQL that is supposed to be more efficient, which could help reduce the resources this site uses.
Wow, yeah, that's a huge difference. Let me know if I can be of any help this weekend getting the new site set up. It's not like I know a great deal about web server configuration but I know my way around Linux and can do research.
I originally signed on with this host because of their affordable shared hosting. It was costing me nearly $50 / year for 250GB bandwidth / month, which was more than enough for the site's traffic. When they made me switch to a VPS, their least expensive plan cost $24.99 for 3 months and came with only 125GB bandwidth / month, which it turns out is not enough for the whole month. To get more bandwidth, the next least expensive plan is double the price and still provides only 200GB bandwidth, and their 300GB plan is triple the price. So, if I stay with this host, annual hosting costs could go from nearly $50 / year to nearly $200 or $300 / year, depending upon how much bandwidth I need. With the new host, I will have both a VPS account and available bandwidth measured in terabytes for closer to $50 or $60 / year, depending on how often I pay for it.
Thanks for your efforts on this. Out of curiosity, what prompted the move?
The move has not happened yet. I reverted back to the original host, because things are taking longer than I had expected. I have to figure out more things on my own over there and become even more expert in setting up a VPS. I will be working on getting the new server working with a less critical domain, make sure copies of this site can work with that domain, and then finally move this site when I have things working properly and I have a better handle on what I'm doing.
This site is moving to a new server. I have created new nameservers for chessvariants.com, and I have changed the DNS entries for chessvariants.com and chessvariants.org to use them. The site will change to the new server once these change propagate through the internet. Once that happens, things may be down for a while, and I will copy over recent changes from my account on the old server. In the meantime, you might want to hold off on starting new games or tournaments. I'll let you know when the change is complete.
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Thanks Fergus!