Rob's Blog

For the last couple of months all my work with WordPress has been on a pre-built, hosted web server. I’ve always found WordPress to be a relatively straightforward application to use so when my company needed to set up some employee blog microsites I decided to build a server for it.

So, what first? Although WordPress does run on IIS, I decided to build myself a Linux server from scratch. I’ve actually decided to run the WordPress MU edition, which has some issues with IIS, not least because it relies on Apache’s mod_rewrite. Yes, I know I could have installed Apache on a Windows server but, as my web server already has IIS on it, I’ll go for a whole new machine. I already have VMware Server here so it’s a trivial task to set up a new Virtual Machine. Plus, it’s been a while since I played with Linux and it’s always good to keep your hand in, as it were.

So, first things first, off I went to the UK Mirror Service to download the latest network boot ISO for OpenSuSE. From the last time I used Linux I’d found OpenSuSE to be one of the easiest to use and manage, so best to stick with the devil you know, I guess.

Setting up OpenSuSE was a breeze – download the mini boot ISO, point the installation routine at your install repository and choose the packages you want to install. I decided not to go for a GUI – this is a server after all – but I did pick the “Web and LAMP” server option. I was installing it over the net, so wanted the downloads to be as quick as possible.

After a successful SuSE install, the first thing I installed was the phpMyAdmin package. The reason for this was simple; if this worked, I knew that all three of the major components I needed (Apache, PHP, MySQL) were installed and functioning the way they needed to. Installing phpMyAdmin is painless; extract it into a directory which is accessible to Apache and point your URL at it. Manually creating the config directory was a snip (once I RTFM) and the config script worked a charm.

So now I have a working Linux server, running everything I need to get multi-user blogging set up. On to the installation of WordPress MU. This part was very easy – anyone who’s ever installed WordPress will be instantly familiar with the quick and painless setup. Tomorrow I’ll actually start working with WordPress MU – hopefully there are very few differences between this and what I’m used to!