OnEye - Installing to Debian Wheezy on Virtualbox

v 0.35

13 May 12

Last post I said I had OnEye successfully installed.  Here is how I did it.

Initially when I thought of setting up a server, I thought of buying a low power piece of hardware and using that, but then realised I already had an under-utilised desktop that could easily run a server in the background using virtualisation - an opportunity to try out and learn a few skills in the process.

After updating Virtualbox to the latest version, I created a new virtual machine.  I've learnt a bit about setting the boot device since my last installation and so with the new virtual machine entry highlighted in the VirtualBox window, press the "Settings" button.  Press "Storage" and then click the CD icon under "IDE Controller", then on the right where it says cd/dvd drive, click the icon of the cd and from the dialog box, move to and select the iso image you want to boot from.  Now when you press "Start" it will boot from your downloaded ISO - in my case, the Debian Testing Netinstall ISO -

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso  .


Once I started the install, it came up with the standard debian install dialog - as contained in a number of Debian installation how-tos. The text installer is readable and when you think about the selections, they are logical.

• English language
• Where you are in the world (Australia for me)
• American English keyboard

I chose the guided partitioning with separate partitions and accepted the defaults - I'd created an expandable 250 GB virtual machine so this is what the Debian Installer gave me:

/ 350mb
/usr  9 GB
/var  3 GB
/swap 2.1 GB
/tmp  398 mb
/home 233.5 GB

When Tasksel presented itself, I deselected the desktop and selected

• Web server
• SSH server 
• Standard System Utilities

Later, just to be sure I also installed the apache2 package and restarted apache2.  I installed links2 and was able to confirm the webserver was functioning in both root and user accounts with

$ links2 http://localhost/index.html  and
$ links2 http://localipaddress/index.html

Unfortunately, I was unable to see the page on any other machine on the network.  A read of the Virtualbox documentation.  I was using NAT which was fine for general web browsing etc, however for using a server, I needed a Bridged adapter.  I shut down the server, changed the network adapter to "bridged" and restarted.  Fixed.

On an external computer, simply type the local ip address into the web-browser and it will be found - so that worked.

Next task was to assign a permanent ip address from my router.  Logged into it and assigned a local ip address based on the MAC address shown with "ifconfig" in the Virtual Machine.  Restarted networking and my new assigned ip address was done.

The default webserver install of debian also installs php5.  To that I added

• php5-sqlite 
• php5-imap 
• sqlite 
• gzip 
• mc  (midnight commander)

As root, downloaded the latest oneye 0.9, moved it to /var/www/ and unzipped it.

# cd /var/www
# chmod -R 777 oneye/

on another computer, opened web browser  http://ipaddress/oneye

violas .....



There are an initial few questions, however they are pretty quickly sorted and the installation takes only a short time.  The only other thing you need to do is to edit the config file to make yourself the admin instead of root on the system.  Do this by going to:

# cd /var/www/oneye/
# vi settings.php
or whatever editor you like - I actually used mc for this

About 80% the way through the file is a comment that says

"// The real god of oneye users, the master of masters "
define('REAL_ROOTUSER','root');

change the "root" for whichever user you like.  Now when you set system preferences, you will get access to the Admin panel.


That's it.

Later 12 May ....

• Installation of additional applications is dead simple.  Download the "eyepackage" to the admin desktop and click it - it installs.  Done.
• Integration of FengOffice and SugarCRM is available, so instead of using "sqlite" as the database manager, it might be advisable to use "Mysql" in the initial install.

13 May

Something that shows my inexperience in servers.  It occurred to me this morning that the data from web users was being accumulated in /var rather than /home.  Obvious when you think about it, but when you are used to a desktop  system, all the users having their data in /home is ingrained.

So, need to download "PartedMagic" and "boot" from the iso to graphically resize the partitions of my virtual machine.  I could also use "parted" from the command line I guess and it would do me good to have a look at it.  In any case, another wrinkle in the saga and something else learned.

Later....