Exercising My Inner Geek

I have been hosting this website for a long time on a series of computers. There has been a succession of computers in the 16 years: my old PowerMac 7600, my Titanium PowerBook, a Grape iMac, a blue and white G3, a Windows computer bought from Esri, the 2009 Mac Mini, and most lately the 2013 Mac Mini. I upgraded the hard drive in the 2009 Mini back in 2014, but it’s been doing a light load of odd jobs.

I have been using MacOS Server for the web server stack for years now, but I found out lately that the new version of Server that is compatible with the newest version of MacOS (Mojave) removes a lot of functionality, including the web server. I was content to worry about this someday, but now that Mojave is out, I needed to figure this out. I toyed with some different options, but this weekend I thought I would try setting up the old Mini (Tiny).

It took most of the weekend, but in the end, I was successful. What I did:

• Installed the latest version of macports.
• Used macports to install apache, MySQL, PHP, BIND, phpMyAdmin and a bunch of other packages.
• Then I got to work configuring everything, and transferring database info and other content to Tiny.
• As the pièce de resistance: I set up a proper CA-signed TLS certificate for biickert.ca via LetsEncrypt. The whole site is now HTTPS.

It took a long time, especially setting up HTTPS, but it’s all done. In some ways, it’s a downgrade, going to the old computer. But in other ways it’s an upgrade:

• The latest versions of the software,
• HTTPS,
• Everything automatically restarts when the computer does,
• It leaves the “main” computer with fewer jobs (iTunes, Plex, UniFi).

And now we can install the OS update at will.