Building a LAMP Server Round 2

I received a phone call from my brother on Thursday afternoon saying that one of my computers was making an annoying beeping sound. He placed his phone next to the computer and it was a dreaded infinite beep. He asked me what he could do to make it stop and I told him to pull the plug. I knew what it meant.

Recently I have been building a LAMP Server so that I could efficiently do web development at home. Previously I was running Apache, PHP and MySQL on my main machine (windows based) and I just never have liked the way it worked.

The meaning of the infinite beep that my brother informed me about confirmed what was happening with my recent setup. The CPU was overheating and this would cause a BIOS Checksum Error when the machine rebooted.

Back to the drawing board.

My thoughts with this situation was perhaps the heatsink and CPU were not in harmony with the thermal compound I was using, in fact I believe I used too much of the compound and the heat transfer was not happening correctly which would cause overheating issues.

I stripped the computer case bare of the components and removed the Zalman fatal1ty heatsink from my AMD 64bit CPU and proceeded to remove all the thermal compound. This of course isn’t a difficult task but it can get messy if you get the thermal compound on your hands.

After the CPU and heatsink surfaces were clean and dry I used a smaller amount of the thermal compound and ensured it covered the entire surface top of the CPU. I laid the Zalman fatal1ty heatsink back into place and reattached it to the motherboard ensuring proper fit. At this time I also put the computer all back together and booted it back up.

No issues so far.

While at work I made another copy of Ubuntu 7.10 Server onto CD so that I could ensure I had an uncorrupted copy of the OS I wanted to install. The nice things about Linux (Ubuntu included) is that installation of the OS goes much quicker than Windows. I managed to get through the installation processes and set up Ubuntu to my liking. You know update apt-get, run a static IP, configure Apache, install the PHP packages I wanted, set up MySQL and also set up Samba for my live script editing.

Why do I use Samba?

I use Samba for my live script editing. With my windows machine I create a mapped network drive to the Samba share where I keep all my web development scripts. This is also the same directory for which Apache’s document root is set to.

This allows for easy access when I am working on my web projects. It also helps ensure proper integration from development to live when it is time to upload projects to various web hosts.

Security wise I have set Samba to only allow 1 particular user to access this share. This ensures that the people upstairs don’t ‘accidentally explore’ their way using their wireless access into my development server and ruin my projects.

It’s Alive!

So far things are running smoothly and no weird hardware issues. I am glad that my Linux server is running properly and giving me no grief. I can get back to what I love to do which is web development. I can get back into the groove of working at home and continue one some of my personal web projects I have slotted. I can also be more confident in taking on more client projects so I can generate a bit more side revenue, after all making money is a good thing right?