Multiple hosted websites are redirecting to only one of my sites on Apache

I had an interesting problem today.

I am attempting to host 3 different web sites on an apache configuration on a raspberry pi. Individually, I can launch each webpage without issue and have the site show up. However, somehow, when I enabled more than one site at a time, each one on different ports, it would show only one site across all ports.

I tried configuring different sites with different ports, changed <Directory> tags to see if my directories were overriding each other, etc.

Most of the data is stored in /var/www/[site-name], so it was only until I tried adding another site at /var/www/[different-site-name] and have it still happen that I knew it was not a path conflict. I fudged with the apache settings for a while to no effect.

A little voice in my head hinted at one of the configuration files I had used a long time ago, the /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf file. I checked it out, and it had this to say:


NameVirtualServer *


Now, in my website ports.conf file, I specified lines like this:

NameVirtualServer *:80
NameVirtualServer *:8081
NameVirtualServer *:8082

Somehow it clicked. I disabled the /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf contents by changing the line to this:

# NameVirtualServer *

saved and restarted apache.

Now everything works as configured.

It may seem like a trivial problem, but it cost me a couple hours of my valuable time and I *could not* find a solution on google. Granted, I didn't scour the bowels of the internet for this small problem.

Hopefully this will help others in my position.

(Performed on a Raspbian installation)

Ubuntu 13.04: First Impressions - fails to install

After going through the livecd process which was smooth and uneventful, when it came to the reboot back into the installed system, all I got was a blinking cursor on a black screen.

This is caused by Grub not being installed properly, for whatever reason.

The solution was for me to mount my filesystem (/dev/sda1 in my case) and use the "grub-install --root-directory=/mount/point/ /dev/sda" command. If I didn't add the --root-directory option, it would fail.

Rebooting again allowed me to log in.

Not impressed Canonical. I'll keep going with this OS for a bit, but when it comes to reliability and usefulness, I stick with Gentoo.

Update:

The problem is with one of the raid packages, as this also occurs on Debian 7 in the same situation. It's not an Ubuntu-specific problem, but upstream. Still, with such a blocker for an install, I don't see how it could have crept through TWO different distribution QA phases.

Django: Common Errors, variables not appearing

While it's against the django mindset, I have done a few copy-pastes in my time using this framework.

Recently I've been doing some copy-pasting of some modules and found that often I was getting blank lines when retrieving variables.

The problem was that my text editor was fudging with the tab order of some of the lines-- a huge problem in python-based programs. My Meta class was tabbed forward so it was part of the method, not the class. By de-tabbing it, I was able to see my variables as expected.

Sometimes it's the small things.
If such a scenario exists, a better idea that goes along with the DRY principle would be to create one base Form class with the Meta class and have all other classes inherit it appropriately.

Django: Python Unchained

So I've been doing a lot of work with django lately (https://www.djangoproject.com/) and it has been an excellent MVC so far. Python in particular is very powerful and I've had 3+ years of experience with it, as opposed to CakePHP and Ruby on Rails (PHP/Ruby).

However, MVC's are not without their difficulties, even though they do save time and effort. Documentation has always been the #1 issue when using other people's software, and to this day there have only been a couple bits of software I've used with proper docs. Python and KDE are two big names at the top of my head.

I experienced one such django issue for which there wasn't a clear answer to what I was experiencing, and with the interests of newbies in mind, I will document some of those weird django errors in this blog.


Problem: Django is not displaying a view and gives 404 errors, doesn't report URLs that are defined in the urls.py file.

Solution: Every definition of the urlpatterns variable must include a blank string at the start of the tuple parameter you supply.

Wrong:
urlpatterns = patterns(url(r'^index/', index.index),
)

Right: 
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^index/', index.index),
)

In hindsight, it would be a simple fix if I knew what pattern() required. I hope this helps at least one other person.

Cheers.


p.s. I *would* like to format code snippets properly, but apparently Blogger is incapable of doing so without some css/javascript tweaking. =/