Acheson Home

After doing a major upgrade of ubuntu, I was no longer able to log into my drupal site. Did major hair-pulling, but finally stumbled on the issue (and cure) here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8125299/moved-drupal-7-site-to-a-diff... (all the way at the bottom).

Apache's NameVirtualHost mechanism allows (among other things) a single numeric ip address to handle multiple domains' websites. For example, the DNS entries for both this site (home.acheson.org) and another site point to the same numeric ip address. Apache delivers the appropriate content to incoming requests based upon the domain name in the request record.

Setting this up is quite straightforward and is well described in Apache's documentation: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/examples.html

When you create an EC2 instance, Amazon assigns a so-called public DNS to it that gets you to your new instance via browser or ssh client or whatever. It is not exactly memorable, looking something like ec2-54-123-45-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com. With just a few minutes of effort, though, you can set your own domain name to point to the new instance.

The first step is to create an "elastic ip address" in the EC2 management console (look for the link in the left sidebar). This gives you a unique numeric ip address to use.

Today I set up a new D7 instance on Amazon Web Services.

Some basics about it: