One thing that a few people have expressed interest in already is this: what did I need to do to get this server running Smalltalk? Well, the first step involved some basic investigation: where could I find affordable VPS hosting? After looking around, I settled on slicehost for that (click here to sign up) - they have decent rates, the reviews I found looked positive (at least one of the inexpensive alternatives, which will remain nameless, had horrid reviews). Before I go further, I should explain why I had to look into VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated root server. If you run typical web software, it fires off a new instance every time a request is made; Smalltalk isn't like that. You have your Smalltalk image running all the time, listening on a port. So if you pick a hosting service that charges for CPU time, you'll get hit on that. Anyway, I asked around about domain registrars, and got referred to GoDaddy - that was simple, although boy oh boy - do they ever want to upsell you on things :) Once I got that and slicehost set up, I needed to set the DNS records up - this post walked me through that easily. With that out of the way, a few things remained: Getting Smalltalk onto the slicehost server Getting the specific packages for my blog server onto the slicehost server Setting up the Apache configuration (installing Apache first)

The first two were simple: I used a combination of wget and scp to transfer files up to my server, and then copied them into the directories I wanted them in. I set up a non-root user to run the Smalltalk server, and gave that user ownership of the appropriate directories, so that I didn't need to operate as root. Then I edited my files for the new setup, and started the server on a specific port. At this point, my Smalltalk server wouldn't start, telling me that the file (VM) didn't exist. This seemed strange; then I realized that I had a 32 bit VM and a 64 bit server. So, off to install the 32 bit libs:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

A minute or so later, the VM started fine, and doing this (not the port I'm using, btw) worked:

http://www.myNewDomain.com:12345/blog/blogView

Now I wanted to get rid of the port number in that url. With some help from Steve Rees, I did the following two things:

set up symlinks for the necessary mod-proxy load files in:

• /etc/apache2/mods-available in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
• copied proxy.conf up out of the mods-available dir and into /etc/apache2
• Edited that file:

 ProxyRequests On

        <Proxy *>
                AddDefaultCharset off
                Order deny,allow
                Deny from all
                Allow from .myNewDomain.com
        </Proxy>

Then, in httpd.conf (same directory), I added the following:

<Location /blog>
ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
</Location>

At which point, the base url, http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView worked. And that was it - other than getting some files that I forgot to copy over the first time, it all worked fine.

So the bottom line? Getting a Smalltalk based server running on the net is pretty simple now, and not at all expensive. Over the next few years, I expect the price for VPS to drop even more, so it's only going to get easier. So if you're a Smalltalker and want to get your app running out on the net - just go do it :)

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