As you can see things have taken a turn for the better since my last posts.

I had to abandon the idea of setting the Alcatel DSL modem to the Linux box. Sure, sure, you’ll find plenty of articles telling how to do it. Load this or that version of the microcode. Don’t load it at all. Run the Mandrake configurator. Never run it. Start at boot. Start at boot and it will never work again even if it used to. Finally, for the sake of my sanity and my marriage, I gave up.

That means that my Windows XP machine continues to be the gateway to the internet. I set up Apache on the Linux machine which, after my modem dramas, was incredibly easy and well-documented. I still needed IIS (as the point of first contact) to pass back internally the URL that had been requested. Unfortunately IIS can’t do this without destroying the original information about what was requested. ISA Server can but this is a beast of a package and certainly more sophisticated and expensive than I was willing to take on.

Eventually I realised that Apache could do the job, so I disabled IIS and installed Apache on my windows machine. Apparently what I want to do is called “proxied mass name-based virtual hosting” and it’s a fairly niche requirement. Some of my damaged pride was restored then when I got the Windows version of Apache up and running with correct settings to facilitate this in under an hour.

My system now works as follows: somebody enters a URL in their browser – say “psychicquesting.com” or “simonjnugent.com”. Both resolve to the same IP address (the external IP of my windows machine) and both hit my Windows Apache (reverse proxy) server. It passes the request exactly “as is” to the Apache server on my Linux box but it then scans the original URL (“psychicquesting.com” or “simonjnugent.com”) and routes each to a different directory. Thus I can now host as many different websites as I want on my two machines with a single IP address.

The downside of all this technical wizardry is that my existing personal website got decimated because it was meshed into IIS. مجموعة يورو 2024 As part of my plan (unbelievably – yes I have one) I needed to set up two separate blogs on the same machine (one for each website) so this gave me the push I needed to do some thorough testing using my personal website and blogs as lab animals. Happily I managed to copy across all past data from SQL server to MySQL (did I mention I installed this on my Linux box as well – also very easy) with the carriage returns being the only losers. امم اوروبا 2024 A small price to pay as I now have a “proper” blog which I hope that you will find is much easier to use than the previous version. بينجو العاب