I know it’s been a while since I last posted but things got a little hectic when the school I work for started back. Now I’m gathering pieces for a new gaming machine. So far I’ve got the case (Antec P180) and video card (eVga 7900 GT PCI express, going to get another one eventually for SLI). Parts to come are OCZ mod stream 700W SLI power supply, 2GB OCZ Dual Channel DDR2, AMD X2 4600+, Abit Fatitly board, WD 160GB Raptor SATA, Maxtor Diamond Max 10 300 GB SATA, and a 250 GB external Hard Drive. I’ve already got two 18′ LCDs, a Logitech Laser mouse and Microsoft keyboard. Hopefully I’ll have all these parts within the next two months and play some F.E.A.R and Battlefield 2 and get back some benchmarks.
New Web site
My Dad is becoming a General Contractor (Builds Houses), and I decided that a web site might be a good thing for him to have. So recently I’ve been working on the site and I think that it’s coming along nicely. I really like the layout of the site. I’ve been using Gimp to edit some of the images for the menu, it works pretty good for doing basic editing, I imagine with a little more patience I could get it to do anything. Nevertheless I’ll probably stick with Paint Shop Pro to do any complicated designs.
Back up and working
I was recently having some issues with my blog server software but after reinstalling everything is just fine now. My email server was down for a little while lately as well. I was making sure that my emails I recieved and sent would be virus free. I was using clawin for my virus scanner. It just had a little issue with it not wanting to scan the emails in the temporary folder. Also I finished writing a little script to keep my internet connection up. If when my server runs the script and it can’t ping some well known stable address then it reboots my dsl router. So now I shouldn’t be given a problem with down time anymore.
Installing PHP v. 5
As promised I’m writing a guide for installing PHP on a Windows 2000 server. First you need to get the latest version of PHP and have a glance over the instructions they give on installing on windows. I’m not going into any minuet details, unless needed.
SquirrelMail
I recently installed and finished setting up SquirrelMail. I thought it might be helpful for some if I wrote a guide for installing and maintaining squirrelmail.
The first thing you’ll need are the latest version of Squirrelmail (I’ll refer to this by SM from now on) which at the time of writing was 1.5.1 was the latest development build and the only one that currently works with PHP v. 5 which I had installed earlier for the purposes of this blog.
Later I will publish a guide for installing PHP. The next thing you need is an IMAP capable server (I’m using hMailServer). Then since I installed SM on a windows 2000 server, I needed a copy of PERL (not necessary because you can edit the config by hand but just makes life easier). The first thing you want to do is unzip the SM files to a location outside of your inetpub folder for security reasons. Then you will want to create a virtual directory under IIS, make sure that this directory is writable because you will be uploading data to SM.
After that you want to run the PERL script located in SM under the config folder named conf.pl. Just go through all the options changing them to suit your needs. The main ones to pay attention to are the ones concerning the type of IMAP server you have and where the server is if it’s not located on the same machine. After getting everything configured you should try logging in. If your able to correctly login and receive and send mail congratulations you’ve setup SM.
The next thing you should do is search through the plugins section of SquirrelMail and find ones that would make you SM experience easier. The ones I recommend are the administrator plugin which allows you to remote access and change your config file. Also the admin_add plugin to easily add admins for the SM installation. I also activated the spam filters, calendar, newmail options, and the spell checker that are included in 1.5.1. A word on the Spell Check you will need another program in order for the spell check to work on windows. It’s called Aspell, there is a guide on installing Aspell for windows here under the windows section. After installing all the plugins that you needed, your SquirrelMail experience should be great.
