[GLLUG] Server Seminar Series Recap
Clay Dowling
clay at lazarusid.com
Sun Jul 26 12:50:09 EDT 2009
Yesterday we had our final seminar in our Server Seminar Series. It was
a long day, but successful, and several of our members were able to go
out with working LAMP servers.
There were also several other lessons learned:
1. Linux runs best in native mode, rather than emulation. Our
experiences yesterday with Linux running under emulation were not happy.
They failed for different reasons, but they still failed. There are
obviously people running Linux under emulation very successfully, but it
appears to take a fair amount of experience to do it well.
2. Run servers from a server distribution of Linux. I did my
presentation with a desktop version, and it took a lot of twiddling. A
bunch of other people were also using desktop, and they had the same
twiddling issues.
3. Install Drupal from sources, not from a distribution system.
Installation from source went well, but one participant who installed
from his package system had a lot of trouble.
4. Command line skills are essential. Some members who were trying to do
system administration with a graphic interface to the filesystem had
trouble. That means we need to make more of an effort at promoting the
command line classes, since we've established that being uncomfortable
with the command line is a significant barrier to entry.
5. Installing LAMP software isn't trivial. If we run this seminar in the
future, we need to establish a more straight-forward way to get a LAMP
server ready and install software. A lot of this goes back to lesson
1. And honestly, there might be a case to be made from running this on
FreeBSD or OpenBSD, possibly by providing a machine or machines to use
in the class. BSD is definitely optimized to run as a server.
Clay
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