OMNINOGGIN

Previously, I mentioned that I was not able to successfully send emails via sendmail. This functionality is quite useful because WordPress, among other things, uses sendmail to send emails to you when someone leaves a comment on your post. So it turns out that because most public mail servers (i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc) do not trust my “omninoggin.com” mail server domain, all messages I sent were refused. After hours of research, I found out that I can route my mail traffic through my internet service provider’s mail proxy (SBC Yahoo!) to get this to work. Read on…

WP-Cache is a Wordpress plugin that improves your Wordpress speed by caching a static version of each dynamic page request and deliverying that static version for subsequent requests to that page. This in combination with Wordpress internal cache, Apache cache, eAccelerator op code cache, and Varnish proxy cache provides the ultimate setup to combat traffic storms if your article gets dugg. *Note* that there is also a method that helps you turn on WP-Cache on demand (only during traffic storms), but I will discuss that in a later article.

If you’ve ever tried to install the WP-Cache plugin for Wordpress just by uploading to the wp-content/plugins directory and activating it via Wordpress Plugins administration, then you know that 99% of the time that method will not work because of some file permission problems.

Here is the proper way to do it: Read on…

If you don’t have “cvsup” installed, do so by following the tutorial on Open Addict (section: Rebuild the World, and Recompile the Kernel):

Since all you have to do to update your ports is run the command:

cvsup -g -L 2 /root/ports-supfile

Just stick that command in your crontab and make it run every midnight.

crontab -e # This opens the crontab in the vi editor.

Add this line to the crontab:

0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g -L 2 /root/ports-supfile

Shift+zz to save and you are done.

This it one of the reasons why I love Unix. With little thought, everything is script-able and customizable.

I hope I can get some part-time consulting jobs to do this optimization for small businesses. All in all, it doesn’t seem too hard to do and I enjoyed doing it. If you run into a problem just google it for the answer. Anyway, here is the recap of the steps I took to set up my FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server.

1. Installing OS
2. Setting Up Apache, MySQL, and Other Services
3. Migrating Wordpress from WinXP to FreeBSD
4. Optimizing Apache
5. Optimizing MySQL
6. Optimizing PHP
7. Proxy Caching
8. Optimizing Wordpress with WP-Cache
9. Keeping Your FreeBSD Ports Up-to-Date Effortlessly
10. Setting Up Sendmail on FreeBSD 6.2