Sam McAfee's questions

I am having a crazy issue with Route53.

I have two domains: startuppatterns.com and startuppatternsbook.com. I transferred both of them to Route53 over a week ago. The transfer went fine.

Two days ago, I started setting up hosted zones so I could swap the nameservers and launch my new site. I've done this enough times for clients, it seemed no big deal.

startuppatterns.com I have successfully set up to route to an S3 bucket, where I host a static HTML site. It's got an SOA, NS, A, MX, and CNAME that are all working great. I believe the actual Nameservers were put in automatically when I transferred the domain.

startuppatternsbook.com is pointing to a bucket as well. That bucket is set to redirect to the other domain, which is what I want.

However, startuppatternsbook.com is failing. It has all the same SOA, A, NS, and CNAME records (no MX in this case), but propagation doesn't seem to be working. Route53's own testing tools seem to say it's live, but all the online tools report failure.

Not sure what to do next. Any ideas?

We have a website that we serve from Elastic Beanstalk (AWS), and it all works great. We use the built-in load balancer to serve our site over HTTPS, etc. Our database is separated through the RDS service, not on the same EC2 instances as our web servers. We are happy with the set up so far.

Now, we would like to set up a WordPress blog under '/blog' on our site's domain (not a separate or subdomain, for SEO reasons). Our site is a custom-built PHP application (using the Laravel framework) and I would rather not host both the WP application and our site from the same place.

I believe that we can use CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to serve just the /blog part of our site, and route those requests to a separate WP install on different EC2 instances. I have used CloudFront to do regular CDN kind of stuff (static assets) but I am kind of lost as to how to set up this particular kind of configuration.

First, is this a crazy idea, or does it sound OK? Second, if it's reasonable, what are the things I need to know to set this up?

I am running Apache2 on a Mac OS X (10.5). I just compiled PHP 5.2.8 and finally got pdo-mysql working (or so I think).

This terminal command:

php --version

is showing 5.2.8 and I have the right modules installed.

But, when I do a phpinfo(), Apache dumps out PHP 5.2.6 (my earlier version, without pdo_mysql).

How do I tell Apache which PHP to load? The httpd.conf has the line:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

But, I don't know what or where that is.

Is that what I have to change?