more on the new side project

So after looking around, asking a few people and doing a little reading I've updated www.ratsandrogues.com. Kind of funny that that is going faster than setting up rattis.net.

So yesterday, I set up WordPress, and re-wrote the two entries that were on the Rats and Rogues page. Then created two accounts. Then finally set up email using virtual domains (Postfix + Mysql + dovecot, etc).

Wish I could say it was all easy and simple. But it wasn't.

Problems I came across:
Wordpress:

1) www.ratsandrogues.com/feed wasn't working. The feed validator sites were saying not feed webpage. Going there got a 404 error.

2) If I set the url to be a custom for the entries, I could get a 404 error. But leaving the urls set as standard instead of custom would work.

2.5) the settings page for custom url said that .htaccess was not writable.

Solution
It looks like all three issues were related. One large problem with simple solutions but took forever to research.

2.5) created the .htaccess file in the root directory for the wordpress site. then changed ownership to the apache daemon user name.

That allowed the site's setting page to update the .htaccess file.

1 & 2) This one took more time, and lots more research. It looked like that .htaccess file was being ignored. I remember disabling .htaccess when I set up mod_security. Did some reading. I had set AllowOverride NONE in the config file, and I've had to make changes to the vhosts under that global directive. Once I changed that for only the Rats and Rogues site both the rewrites for custom URLS and the feed started working.

Email:
Uh this one was a mess.
1) getting the alias forwarding table to push to multiple people.
2) getting email to forward to the people above.

Solutions:
1) I searched around forever trying to figure out how to insert more than one name in the time. I saw some screen grabs that showed it but no idea how they did it. Then one webpage said that most use PHPMyAdmin. Yeah, didn't want to install that. To make it work:


INSERT INTO forwarding (`source`, `destination`) VALUES ('aliasemail@example.com', 'email1@example.com, email2@example.com');


Which is just the written out way of saying give the value of the 2 columns, 'source' and 'destination', with 2 elements. The first one is the alias email. the second one is a list of emails seperated by commas (,) between the single quotes (') for the second element.

2) With both names in the forwarding table, I gave it a test.

<user2@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table

<user1@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table


Fixing that required commenting out:

receive_override_options = no_address_mappings

in the Postfix main.cf

Which left me with:

User unknown in virtual alias table


which was there because while trying to fix the other problem I set the domain name in

virtual_alias_domains =


once I fixed that, everything worked.