Hello Folks, This is a postmortem email about setting up a Linode server to use Livecode Server. If you are not interested in learning about a great service (Linode), a great control panel (Virtualmin) and a great server language (Livecode server), then, you should just close this.
I've been involved with Livecode and the Web since a long time. I did CGI stuff, tried FCGI stuff and then migrated to the new server offerings as soon as it was available. One of the hardest things when talking about the web is keeping yourself current. You don't need to ride the bleeding edge, actually, you shouldn't ride the bleeding edge at all when dealing with production servers. The problem is when you start falling behind. I am a happy user of JaguarPC hosting ( http://www.jaguarpc.com ) but I noticed that I seldon use their services. My VPS is unmanaged. I use my own control panel and not the ones they make available. In the last five or so years, I called support couple times and my biggest problems was a screw up on their node configuration that was not caused by me at all. My problem there was my choice of operating system for my host. My VPS is ancient, I set it up five years ago and selected CentOS because it was the closest thing I could have to a full RHEL install. Truth be said, I don't like CentOS. I never did. I think YUM is a bad manager and I don't like RPM based systems. But my served worked fine up until some weeks ago when it started crashing randomly. Every ten or so days, Apache would die. No log written. I tried everything and I am yet to find what is causing the crash. The correction is easy, I just need to reboot apache, so I built myself a little watchdog that checks to see if Apache is actually serving my page, if it stops, then my watchdog reboots it, the process takes less than a minute. I decided it was time to upgrade CentOS. I am sure this crash is something about a bad interaction between libraries and modules. The problem is YOU CAN'T UPGRADE CENTOS VERSIONS!!!! Yes, you read it right, there is no way to upgrade CentOS 5 to CentOS 6. The recommended way is to build a new server, install CentOS 6 and move the content. Well, if I am going to build a new server, it might just be Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. So, I decided to build a new server and since I was in the mood for trying new things, I signed up with Linode ( http://www.linode.com ). I've choosen the Linode 768 plan and installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in it. The process was painless and the online guides helped a lot. The time between signing up for the service and having a server up was less than 20 minutes. Next, I decided to install Virtualmin ( http://www.virtualmin.com ). Virtualmin is a professional control panel. I don't like Plesk and I don't like cPanel. I can write a book about why cPanel is horrible and Plesk is his ugly cousin. Virtualmin is beautiful and elegant. I paid for Virtualmin and I do it every year, it is that good. The installation of Virtualmin is a single line of in a bash shell, you just download a shell script and runs it. After it process everything, you have a wonderful control panel running. One cool think about Virtualmin is that I can define "Virtual Server Templates". In this templates, I can set any option for a virtual server and I can customize a skeleton folder with prepopulated content for the server. I created a new template called "Livecode Server". I downloaded Livecode Server distribution and placed it in the cgi-bin skeleton folder. I also installed RevIgniter ( http://www.revigniter.com ) on the public_html skeleton folder. My template was ready. Back in the browser, I clicked to create a new virtual server and filled the information for one of my domains, in the template selection, I choose my "Livecode Server" template. I clicked "Create Server", less than 5 minutes of automated processing later, I had my domain running with RevIgniter + Livecode Server working out of the box. No need to setup anything. Whenever I create a new domain on my server, it installs Livecode and RevIgniter automatically. How cool is that? I am building this new server very carefully. The amount of experience you gain in 5 years is a lot and this server already behaves better than my other one. This new server is called Horus and when it is ready, I will clone it and name the new server Osiris. Horus will be the production server because he is the king of Egypt in the land, Osiris will be the development server because he is the king of Egypt in the sky (duat). It will be really easy to keep both Egyptian kings in sync because Virtualmin has an API and export/import routines that will allow me to migrate virtual server and sync them with ease. You can't do these kinds of stunts in normal shared servers where you don't have administrator privileges but when the machine is yours, the sky is the limit. My new server is named after Egyptian kings because I want them to last thousands of years (at least Ubuntu is upgradable). If anyone here is using Linode and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, you should know that Livecode Server 5.0.2 works perfectly out of the box! Cheers Andre "I Still Prefer FreeBSD Over Linux" Garzia -- http://www.andregarzia.com -- All We Do Is Code. http://fon.nu -- minimalist url shortening service. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
