Ians Ramblings

I had an annoying little problem today, I wanted to translate a URL like this:

http://mysite.com/baskets/ians/ian & co.xml

into

http://mysite.com/cgi/baskets_handler/?state=show_basket&username=ians&basket=ian%20%26%20co&ret_type=xml

Using mod rewrite, although ampersands in the URL in this way are dirty and in this case very rare as the interface does not allow the creation of baskets with an ampersand I wanted to handle them just incase.

If it had just been spaces in the basket name I would have just used RewriteMap escapemap int:escape but it always leaves ampersands and passes them through unescaped so they are interpretted as part of the query string.

I ended up with the following, any suggestions on better ways to do it would be gratefully received, please post as a comment:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/baskets [NC]
RewriteRule ^([^&]*)&(.*) $1\%26$2 [N]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/baskets [NC]
RewriteRule ^([^\s]*)\s(.*) $1\%20$2 [N]
RewriteRule ^/baskets/([^/]+)/([^/\.]+)(\.(xml|json))?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/cgi/basket_handler/?state=show_basket&user=$1&basket=$2&ret_type=$4 [P]

I bought a 2TB network storage device the other day a WD MyBook Live but wondered if I could get my old website back up and running on it as well as using it for a media store and for streaming to my PS3. While I was there I got the FTP service working properly so I could access it externally through my router.

These are the steps I took to get MySQL and WordPress installed and running incase it helps anyone else looking to do the same.

Download the config file from your MyBook live under
Settings then Utilities.
Edit the file and set ssh enabled to yes
Re-upload the config using the utilities page again, the box will then reboot
SSH into the box using putty for example

root welc0me

once logged in type

passwd

and press enter
enter new root password
Any changes you want to make to the FTP server can be made in /etc/vsftpd.conf
By the way default passive port range is 5000-5099 which you can tweak.
Update the following to Sources.list in /etc/apt/sources.list
change

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian main

to

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian main contrib non-free

Run

apt-get update
apt-get install mysql-server
apt-get install wget

Run

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvfz latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress /var/www/yourownname

Then just go to http://nasboxip/yourownname/ in your browser to begin the configuration of wordpress
Once complete you will want to add a virtual host to your Apache config in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

I also then changed the existing Apache config file to only allow access from the LAN that way, as it is the default domain it will stop any external web access to the password protected admin interface just in-case there is a weakness in their authentication code.