Simple Webcam on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi’s low power consumption makes it well suited to the role of always-on server. This post describes how to attach a simple webcam to a Raspberry Pi and have it take a snapshot every few minutes, and how to view the pictures on the web. Just like a traditional webcam.

My Raspberry Pi was purchased from New It in the UK. It was installed with Debian 7 (“Wheezy”) by applying the image “2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.zip” downloaded from the raspberrypi.org downloads page. The following procedure was then performed without any further pre-work (other than enabling ssh in the basic setup). Continue reading

Install WordPress Blog on Raspberry Pi

The Pi’s low power consumption makes it well suited to the role of always-on web server. This post describes how to install WordPress on the Raspberry Pi and get a blog going. Hosting your own blog means you keep ownership of your data, and you are not dependent on blogger.com or whoever.  This procedure was UPDATED on 11th march 2020 for Raspbian 10 / Buster.

If you have already installed WordPress and just want to upgrade it, perhaps because a new version has been released, please see my article How to Upgrade WordPress on Linux

Install Apache

Install the Apache web server with these commands. It might take 10 minutes or so to complete. A few other packages will also be installed. Continue reading

BT Home Hub Cannot Access SSL Website

This article explains why the BT Home Hub routers appears unable to access SSL/TLS (https) websites on your internal home network.  It may interest users in the UK, where the Home Hub is a popular router/ADSL modem.

Hosting your own website(s) at home is pretty easy these days.  You have a small server running Apache, and configure your router to forward port 80 to it.  For SSL sites, you forward port 443.  That’s about it. Continue reading

Create a Basic Website on a Raspberry Pi

This article was revised and updated on 29th May 2017.

The Raspberry Pi is a small Linux computer designed to help children learn programming. Being a full Linux System, it can also be used as a server or as the basis for various projects. This post describes how to install Apache onto the Pi and set up a basic web site.

My Raspberry Pi was purchased from RS Components in the UK. It was installed with Raspbian “Jessie” (Debian 8) by applying the image “2017-04-10-raspbian-jessie-lite.img” downloaded from the raspberrypi.org downloads page, where it is described as “Minimal image based on Debian Jessie”. The following procedure was then performed without any further pre-work (other than enabling ssh in the basic setup). Continue reading

http_proxy in Red Hat 5

This post is about setting the http_proxy environment variable in Red Hat 5. Newer versions of the OS allow the variable to be set in either of two ways, that is:

# export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.100:8080
# export http_proxy=192.168.1.100:8080

Both will work. A subsequent call to yum will read the http_proxy environment variable and act on it, using the named proxy to obtain a network connection to the relevant repository. I have tested this successfully on Red Hat 5.7.

Yum Failures

Older versions of Red Hat 5 are more fussy. RHEL 5.4 will allow the first form above (export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.100:8080), but use the second form and yum will barf extravagantly, leaving you with a lengthy Python trace back. Continue reading