Right now, I am using DreamHost shared hosting to host my blog. They pretty much do what they say they do. There is an advantage to easy-click installs in the land of web hosting. I'm really not a server administrator. I'm a programmer. I don't like to think about deploying to servers, or monitoring servers, or configuring servers. However, I decided that I wanted a VPS to host my stuff on. I want to run different things like a git-server, maybe a node-js server, OpenID and possibly even email. There is the idea that I shouldn't be beholden to any company for my personal data. I should be able to host the services that are important to me on a server that, for the most part, I control. After shopping around, I decided to go with ARP Networks. They seem to have really competitive pricing for Linux and Free/OpenBSD VPS hosting. So far, I feel like that is probably a good decision.

I didn't really feel like running full blown Apache on the VPS, and according to a little research, I could even port my Wordpress blog over to a VPS just with Nginx, PHP, and MySQL. I found a few blog entries detailing how they got this combination running. Well, there is one that I had gleamed some information from, but it turns out that information was wrong. Here was the command I was supposed to run, assuming that "jsmith" is my user name.

sudo usermod -G webmasters jsmith

That command is supposed to add my user to the webmasters group. Only problem is that it also removes you from every other group. The proper command is:

sudo usermod -a -G webmasters jsmith

That makes the group assignment an append, not a replace. Here is the important bit of the man page for usermod:

-G, --groups GROUP1[,GROUP2,...[,GROUPN]]] A list of supplementary groups which the user is also a member of. Each group is separated from the next by a comma, with no intervening whitespace. The groups are subject to the same restrictions as the group given with the -g option. If the user is currently a member of a group which is not listed, the user will be removed from the group. This behaviour can be changed via the -a option, which appends the user to the current supplementary group list.

OK, now here is the page with the faulty instructions. It's been up since August of 2008, that's nearly two years.

Hopefully, the folks at ARP Networks will be kind and help me out, or else I'm locked out of my VPS permanently. Don't believe every blog you read, even if looks legit and there are a bunch of comments at the bottom stating how useful and awesome the information is. Really, though, it is my fault for running commands that I didn't understand fully. Anything run as superuser should be carefully inspected.

Update: The ARP Networks folks bailed me out of my ignorance. Apparently, I could have fixed it myself with their out-of-band access tools. Today, I wear the scarlet N (for noob.)