Creating a 2 Tier App for testing
It has been a remarkably long time since my last post, and I apologize for that. Things got in the way…Such as my own laziness, job, laziness. You get the idea.
This blog post was conceived because of the lack of posts out there for this. Granted I may just be dense but it took me a while and some help to get this working and I used a previous blow post from another author for this. This post here http://blog.bertello.org/2015/07/building-a-basic-3-tier-application-for-your-home-lab/ was used as a template but there were a number of problems and things that were left out that caused me issues. So, I took it upon myself to correct those small things and repost it. In full disclosure, I did try to reach out to the blog author, but have not heard back from him yet.
To start out with a bit about my enviro. I created a couple of VMs using my home lab setup of vSphere 6.5. I don’t have anything fancy in it right now, especially since NSX doesn’t run on 6.5 currently. I started the VMs out with what vSphere automatically provisioned for the VMs, 1 vCPU, 2Gb of RAM, and 16GB HD. This can be reduced of course since I am just using CentOS 6.8 minimal install CD and don’t believe there will be a lot of traffic that they need to handle. I ran through the graphical setup and setup a hostname and IP address on each of the machines. The goal of course is to have these machines eventually be on separate network tiers to test out all the features available to us in NSX, such as micro-segmentation. (of course this is once NSX is supported on 6.5 vSphere)
I am using CentOS 6.8 (which is the latest release on 6.x as of this writing) and the main reason why is that I am more familiar with 6.x than 7. Also Linux is free and easy to deploy and doesn’t take much in the way of resources, providing a perfect OS to use. The first thing we need to do is disable the firewall. This IS a lab environment so I am not too worried about hackers etc., and I will be adding NSX firewalls on them later. To accomplish this, type the following:
service iptables save
service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off
You will do this for both machines. We will concentrate on the database server first. This is only going to be a 2 tier app. We will have a Database server and a Web/PHP/Wordpress server. You can add more however you want to but this is a good start. Perhaps for the third you could add proxy like the blog post above. Personally, I was just going to put the client machine on it to access the first two. But it is all up to you – it’s your world, and if you want a happy little tree in there, you put one in there. J
Database Server Config
We are going to use MySQL like the original blog.
yum install -y mysql mysql-server mysql-devel
The above line will install all the needed pieces of SQL that we will need. We now need to start the service, set it to run at start up, and go through the small setup of creating a admin password and deciding whether we want a default database in addition to the one we create and if we want to allow anonymous users and remote root login.
service mysqld start
chkconfig mysqld on
/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
Also another thing I should note is that it is much easier to copy and paste my commands. To do this I would recommend using puTTY. We are now going to create our database and set permissions for it.
mysql -u root -p
SELECT User, Host, Password FROM mysql.user;
CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
CREATE USER wp_svc@localhost;
CREATE USER wp_svc@’%’;
SET PASSWORD FOR wp_svc@localhost=PASSWORD(“Password123”);
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wp_svc@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘Password123’;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO ‘wp_svc’@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘Password123’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Exit
You can change the above to whatever parameters you wish, just write them down as you will need them later. I also bound MySQL to the IP address you can do that at /etc/my.cnf if you wish. The code is below.
bind_address=192.168.1.81
Obviously, you would change the IP address to the one you are using. And that’s it for the DB.
Webserver Config
First thing we need to do on this machine is disable the firewall again. We also need to disable SELINUX since if we don’t, our packets will never leave this machine (something I struggled with and finally got the help of my good friend Roger H. in order to figure out. Shameless plug for him at his blog here http://www.rhes-tech.com/ – I highly recommend you check him out as he is a brain when it comes to Linux things. So here is the code we need:
service iptables save
service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off
In order to disable SELINUX from making our life horrible, we are going to set it to Permissive mode. If we fully disable it, it could scream at us. Therefore, use your favorite text editor and edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux file and you want to change the SELINUXTYPE=targeted. It will look like this :
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
# enforcing – SELinux security policy is enforced.
# permissive – SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
# disabled – SELinux is fully disabled.
SELINUX=permissive
# SELINUXTYPE= type of policy in use. Possible values are:
# targeted – Only targeted network daemons are protected.
# strict – Full SELinux protection.
SELINUXTYPE=permissive
# SETLOCALDEFS= Check local definition changes
SETLOCALDEFS=0
Next we are going to install a ton of stuff.
yum install -y httpd
chkconfig –levels 235 httpd on
The above installs Apache web server and starts it at machine start up. Next we need to install PHP as this is what WordPress requires to run. We will also install the supporting modules.
yum install -y php php-mysql
yum -y install php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-snmp php-soap php-tidy curl curl-devel wget
Next we will download the latest version of WordPress (as of this scribbling 4.7) and we will then need to unzip it and then copy it over to the webserver www home directory. Then we will need to add the config to point back to the DB server.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
cp -r wordpress/* /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
Again, using your favorite text editor open the wp-config.php file and change it like below. If you chose different values for your database name and username/password you will need to use that info now.
// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘wp_svc’);
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘Password123’);
/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘192.168.1.81’);
/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
Once this is done you can go to your website to finish the WordPress install. The address should look something like this. You can use the FQDN or IP address.
http://<WebServer-FQDN>/wp-admin/install.php
When done, your site will be up and ready and look something like this: – CONGRATS
