Neal Here

2024-12-30 01:19:18 PST

Bart Massey 2024

I spent tonight continuing to work on moving my web content to my cloud server. This particular task was bittersweet at best.

My beloved brother Byron passed away in 2010. I miss him constantly.

Byron's website was at http://nealhere.com. I let the domain name go, but kept the website alive in his memory at http://nealhere.po8.org. Take a look: there's a lot of cool old stuff there.

The move was complicated because Byron had built nealhere using a now-ancient version of the excellent blosxom CGI static site generator. nealhere also used server-side includes and .htaccess. So I figured out how to make all these things work with my new nginx installation.

• blosxom needed CGI.pm to function. apt install libcgi-pm-perl.

• blosxom needed plain old CGI. Unfortunately, "slow" CGI is long gone, and the wrapping needed to make things work with FastCGI took some discovery. apt install fcgiwrap, then look at the nginx example under /usr/share/doc/fcgiwrap to get some setup hints.

• Byron's setup used .htaccess to do rewrites. Found out how to do this with nginx rewrite rules.

• Unfortunately, the cursed Zulip installation on the cloud server had set the running userid of nginx to zulip. This caused the fcgiwrap socket to be inaccessible. It's also wrong and gross. I edited the fcgiwrap.socket config file for systemd for now.

Everything is hard and I'm tired. I'm regretting not running Zulip in a VM now. It clearly does not play nice with others.

I miss you, Byron.