Over the past few days I’ve been trying to procrastinate as much as is humanly possible – for example, playing GTA: San Andreas for very large periods of time. However, last night I turned my attention to the website backend that I’ve been developing, and so far the results have been promising.
Basically, the entire concept revolves around a single “site” object, which is set up by a global include script. The constructor sets up the smarty templating, a PDO object and starts PHP sessions. It also checks for login requests and the like. Then, when the page is loaded it simply registers itself with the site object (so it can do some pretty GUI things and also track the user through the pages) and then gets on with the business of doing useful things.
Since PHP5 (finally) supports destructors, it then grabs the page content from the output buffer, slaps it all into a smarty template automagically and then outputs without the script page ever having to do a single thing. Also, error handling can be done really easily – an exception handler catches any PDO errors and, if the site–>error() function is called, it sets an error flag and exits. On exit, the destructor is called and it can do the appropriate stuff.
One final thing I want to do is create a PDO proxy object which will catch and log the queries sent to the database for statistics information. The pseudo–function __call is very useful in this respect.
On the Ubuntu side of things, I’ve finally got it all set up the way I want it. Took me ages to sort out the supposedly simple keyboard layout problem, but in the end I just edited the xorg.conf file manually instead of messing around. And, to be honest, I’m very pleased with the outcome. I don’t have to bother messing around with lots of stuff, and now I even have mplayerplugin working correctly. Amazing. Still have to sort out hibernation, but I think that’s a problem with my grub.conf and 915resolution.
I’m also taking the liberty of upgrading software on my server, and getting it all working properly. It’s currently on the 2.6.12 kernel and has an uptime of 158 days (which I’m very proud of), but I’m afraid that it really needs an update. God only knows how many security holes have been found now, so I’ll probably update that tonight and reboot it when I get home. Also decided that enough is enough, and completely removed X support – it’s really not needed at all on a server.
Looking to the future, I’m planning on replacing the role of my home server by my current desktop machine. Ideally I want my home server to be a small box which only deals with router requests and has no other processes running, purely for security reasons. I’m planning on replacing my desktop at the end of next year, although depending on my financial situation, I may decide to replace it in October.
On the hardware front I’ll definately be going for some kind of dual–core Athlon, but I’m not sure which yet. To be honest, I would absolutely love a dual 7800GTX SLi machine – just for kicks – but that might be a little pricey. It’s basically going to come down to what I can afford. Hopefully the price of hard–drives will have come down dramatically, and I’d like to re–use the drives in my current machine for the new one and have some kind of home–network hard–drive option on the server. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, I suppose.
2:41 pm | Posted in Hardware, Linux, Randomness, Warwick Blogs
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