Making it Useful

Remember why we did all of this in the first place?! It was to allow the web server to serve up things like Kickstart configuration files, Oracle software and maybe a documentation system of sorts. First things first, therefore, you need to download to your physical PC:

• Red Hat Enterprise Server version 5 Kickstart file
• Red Hat Enterprise Server version 6 Kickstart file
• Fedora 15 Kickstart file
• Gladstone Oracle Pre-installer Script

You can also visit the Oracle Website to download whichever versions of the Oracle software you want: I’ll definitely be needing the two 11.2.0.1.0 x86_64 files for Linux, for example. Again, save those files somewhere safe on your physical PC (such as your Desktop).

You’ll also want to get hold of the Instant Client ZIP files for 32-bit Linux, because without them your web server won’t be able to communicate with any database you might go on to create. You will need both the ‘basic’ and the ‘sdk’ versions of the client (at the time of writing, those are the first and fifth links on the download page). Don’t bother with the RPM files: your Apache server runs Ubuntu, not Red Hat, and so can’t easily deal with them. Stick to the plain old zip files instead.

Finally, maybe download the Tiddlywiki software (it comes as a single file, called empty.html -once downloaded, rename that to something more sensible, such as doco.html).

Now all that remains is for you to upload this software cornucopia onto your web server. The easiest way of doing that, I think, is to first switch back to your VM and issue the following commands:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server
sudo passwd root

The first command will probably prompt you for your password and then ask for confirmation of a 1MB download. Once that download completes, your web server will be running an SSH server, which makes file transfer between your host PC and the VM very easy.

That’s where the second command kicks in, too. It’s not a very ‘proper’ way of doing things on Ubuntu, which generally frowns on giving the root user a password and insists instead on you doing everything that needs root privileges via the sudo command. But when it comes to doing simple file transfers using GUI clients, this is tricky -and using a proper root account makes things much simpler. My second command therefore enables the root user account, giving it whatever password you deem fit to supply (twice!).

You can now use a standard ssh client (such as Filezilla) to connect from your physical PC to the Apache server. Specify root as the username, the password you just assigned to the root account and port 22. The first time you do this (at least with Filezilla), you’ll be warned that the server is unknown and asked whether you want to trust it: the answer is obviously going to be to agree to do so! If all goes to plan, you’ll see something a bit like this:

Notice in the right-hand part of the screen how I’ve navigated to the /var/www directory on the web server. That’s it’s root directory -the phpdata.php file we created earlier with the nano text editor is visible there.

You now just drag the files you downloaded earlier from your physical Desktop (or wherever else you saved them) to that /var/www directory. Once you’ve done that, you might end up with this sort of thing:

All the Kickstart scripts; the Gladstone script; the two 64-bit Oracle database zips; the two 32-bit Instant Client zips; and the Tiddlywiki doco.html… this box is now ready to serve these things up to anything that needs them.