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Home Web Hosting With Opera Unite and MovableType

5/27/2011

 
I have hosted MovableType with Opera Unite and you will see, the same Document Root issues await. You will learn that link management depends upon the generation package you are using.  This install uses Ubuntu Linux.
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Initialize Movable Type Normally
Install Movable Type per the guidelines and then initialize it using the Movable Type guidelines.

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Configure Opera Unite
Configure Opera Unite's Computer name.  Remember to choose a name that makes the URL work with the site's content.

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Opera Unite Web Proxy Path
Configure the web proxy settings ensuring the path is to your liking.  This will be the URI of the URL, /blog/ in this example.

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/etc/hosts
Configure /etc/hosts with the blog aliased to localhost so Opera Unite can use a prettier name in the URL.

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Movable Type Publishing Settings
Set the full site URL in Movable Type.  I used http://mt.azcrumpty.operaunite.com/blog.

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Incorrect /mt-static path generation
This screen shot shows pages would be generated with /mt-static, making the URL http://mt.azcrumpty.operaunite.com/mt-static/...  Remember that the local machine's host name must come before content, so the site will look hideous.  We have to fix this in order to make it work.

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Edit mt-config.cgi

Edit your mt-config.cgi file.
Configure the application to generate pages correctly. You need to ensure AdminCGIPath is a local address.  


Add your URI pathname to CGIPath.  I set it to /blog/cgi-bin/movabletype.

Add your URI pathname to StaticWebPath. I set it to /blog/cgi-bin/mt-static.

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Symlink mt-static
Correct the mt-static path for external.

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Correct internal fault with a symlink.

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Place a meta-refresh to load /blog/ as /blog/your_blog_home.  The example is set to /blog/azcrumptys_first_blog.  The symlinks are there to make the Opera Unite Web Proxy find its static content.

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Site Functional Externally
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Site Root In Use by Opera Unite
All this work is due to Opera using the site root for the welcome page.  We had to shift the site and keep it aligned for internal (non Unite) and external (Unite Web Proxy) Use.

Home Web Server with Opera Unite

5/21/2011

 
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Opera Unite Web Server Content
I wrote about using a home based web server in a demilitarized zone within your home a few months ago.  This is a fun and useful task to do, but I left out a strong caution.  Your ISP may prohibit you from doing this as part of your contractual agreement.  Your ISP may even go so far as to filter out the HTTP and HTTPS, ports 80 and 443 respectively, to keep you from running your own home based web server.  So, what can you do?

You can use Opera's Unite system or a competitor home server system such as Tonido.  You should pick a system that agrees to provide the service you want so you don't have to wake up one morning finding your site isn't accessible to the world anymore.  

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Opera Unite With Wordpress
You can find plenty of help with configuring Opera Unite. You can use whatever server you wanted to host your home based web server as your Opera Unite server.

I have found some things with Opera Unite that might be of interest to you.  The URLs can get really long.  Take http://home.azcrumpty.operaunite.com/webserver/content/az/Blog/Blog.html as an example.  This monster URL is configured to use Opera's web server.  The word webserver seems to identify the service I am using.  The word content can be replaced by the word activity for stats.  So two words in the URI are reserved for determining where to retrieve content from.  Finally, your content lies beneath all that in the URL and the path can get really long depending on what you do with your conten.  Opera's built in web server doesn't offer the robust configuration options of Apache or IIS so CGI, plugins, and other functions are nonexistent.

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WordPress URL Needs Rewriting
Opera provides you with a reverse proxy to address your web site's complexity needs.  This gives you complete access to your web server software.  But you may find issues with URLs and need to do some URL rewriting. I found both Wordpress and MovableType hard code some paths into the HTML they generate, however, such things were fixable by Googling or hacking the code. Hard coded host names lead to content not showing up. Internal host names showing up is a general problem that has to be considered when using a reverse proxy.  It seems plenty of sites expect the document root to be available for content.  This is not the case when using Opera Unite's Reverse Proxy.  Opera adds the host name to the URL and shifts the document root over to the right by one path.  This becomes and issue with sites that have URIs that reference the document root.  For example, an image reference href="/images/foo.gif" would look like http://home.azcrumpty.operaunite.com/images/foo.gif.  This would fail since the reverse proxy needs the host name in the URL in order to get the image.  The HTML would have to have the reference as href="/wb/images/foo.gif" or be relative as href="images/foo.gif".  You must check and correct all such links for this problem if you didn't write all the HTML yourself.

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Opera Unite Stats
Performance and security discussions on these services can be found online.  I didn't use performance measurement tools but I watched the images load in on the site and it felt like a dial up modem. This is probably due to the spotty performance I am getting with my ISP right now.  As far as security goes, I would NAT Opera Unite behind pfSense with rules denying access to the internal LAN or I would put the rules on the Opera Unite host itself to minimize the attack possibles should a back door be opened from the Opera browser.  You can also tell your desktop or laptop firewall software to deny all connections from your Opera Unite host. I would only push content to the Opera Unite host that I wanted shared with the world so any unauthorized access to the host would only reveal data I wanted on  the Internet.

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