eCommerce, SGI and SSL/HTTPS
This morning I got another email from Leslie at North Hollow Farm and she's really excited about the site. I'm glad. I think it looks nice, and it's certainly clean and functional. Well... good news. One of the interesting parts of the site is that when an order is placed, it's mailed off to Leslie's email account so that she knows everything she needs to know to get the order started. Nice and clean.
I have asked Cydian once already about getting PHP4 and PostgreSQL on one of their servers, but I'll need to ping them again today about that. If they fall down on this, I know that webPipe.net has both of these in a wonderful package that's about $20/mo. - about what they're paying now. So, here's to hoping that they come around soon and we can move this site into production as soon as possible for Leslie.
On another front, the SGI Freeware site has released their May collection, and it's as impressive an update as I've ever seen. New versions fo GNOME, GTK, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, and a ton of others make this a must have, and long overdue series of updates. I know it'll take some time to get them all downloaded and installed, but that's OK... it'll be worth it.
It's times like this that I think I'd like to have much higher performance SGI hardware and problems that need that power. Problems like my old thesis work, supercompuer-level stuff... something that I could really challenge a machine and my mind at. While I like doing things like this web site for Leslie, it's not the same as trying to solve the electron and hole populations in a III-V semiconductor... and that's really what I wish I could be doing. Unfortunately, I have no ideas for those problems, or I'd likely be trying to solve them on the hardware I have. Too bad... I guess I'll keep searching and hope something turns up.
I also spent some time today trying to get mod_ssl working on tux. I'm convinced that I got the library to compile correctly, but I had a really hard time getting it configured properly. Now I didn't do a lot of planning on this, mainly because I just didn't care that much about it. I wanted to just get an HTTPS: server up so I can test on it. But it seems that while I'm getting close, I'm not close enough. Maybe I'll come back to this later, but it seems as though I'm through the compiling part, and into the difficult configuration part.
UPDATE: - I've done searching on the net and I'm still not convinced that I'm any closer to getting SSL working. Oh sure, I've figured out how to get the certificates and generate my own certificate authority, but I still seem to be unable to get Apache to answer on port 443 - the SSL port. While I think it's quite possible that I'm just not getting the right information from the net, I also know that I'm not as concerned about getting it. I don't have to have SSL on tux - though it would be nice. Maybe I'll do a little more searching tomorrow and see if I run across something that might work.
Yahoo! I got it! I am in the middle of a late-night downloading session for barney so I decided to do a few searches to see if I could find the right stuff. Well... as it turned out I got a complete httpd.conf file and it showed me what I was doing right, and what I still needed to do to get it to work. Thanks for the examples! Now I have it and all is looking good. I now can test the https: links and see how that works into the North Hollow Farm eCommerce site.