Bill Strosberg wrote:
m. Beraud:
It is certainly possible to get an Ubuntu box up and running as a server
in less than a hour or two, and the defaults set are certainly sane.
That being said, the same applies to just about any distribution in the
hands of someone who is familiar with it.
I and others on the list have extensive experience with Ubuntu. Ubuntu
has become my preferred desktop / end-user distro. I've switched my 70+
year old parents to Ubuntu recently from Windows with great results.
For production commercial servers, I use Debian stable rather than
Ubuntu, as it is better tested, has extensive installation history and
very conservative package selection. Ubuntu is happier with current
generation equipment, and Debian stable works better with older
hardware. Avoid installing anything not necessary like X etc.
>From all your discussions taking place here over the last couple of
days, and your valiant efforts - perhaps you may want to consider asking
if an experienced sysadmin be willing to walk you through this process.
Many of us here earn our livings doing this type of thing, and we are
always willing to help and educate.
Hi Bill, yes I was considering just such an action. It was one thing to
go insane figuring this stuff out when I was 30, but at 41, I'm not so
patient anymore. I used to love this stuff, now I just need to get back
to work.
The problem is I'm in a catch22 situation. I can not afford to hire
somebody until this contract pays, and this contact won't pay until I
get this done. :) Ah the life of a foolish entrepreneur.
As far as downtime, I don't think I've ever had more than a two or three
minutes of downtime on a server switchover - cycling ISP facility
routers to clear arp cache problems is about the only time-intensive
step. I usually handle swaps at 2-3:00AM to avoid trouble. Typically,
you bring up the new box in parallel to the existing box, and switchover
only when _everything_ works.
VNC's perceived responsiveness is directly related to server hardware
horsepower/loading, size of pipe, end-to-end network latency,
compression and encryption if used.
Yeah... the real problem is I have only ever managed to make VNC work
using Krfb, which of course requires X and KDE running. Setting up the
VNC server as a stand alone service the way it should be has always
failed (don't know why as it works just dandy on the IIS server - I have
checked everything from firewall to sysvinit and even thought tightVNC
is supposed to start it never does and the only way to get it to do so
is use the GUI as root... not a good idea, or Krfb, which requires the
machine to be logged in as a user automatically as it does not launch
before X... also not a good idea).
Krfb in Mandriva or SuSE with xorg, brings the machine to its knees with
over 70% CPU usage as the constant minimum. With a 350mhz machine that
does not leave a lot of time slices for other processes (like trying to
pipe a 100mbps network which the machine also seems to struggle with,
but is ok as long as VNC is off). The older VNC on the old Mandrake
Distro seems to be light and works pretty fast.
All that being said VNC is a secondary consideration as I really only
ever use it to run the GUI version of the drakconf tools, some of which
MDK oddly did not make available on the text version of drakconf, which
given MDK has stopped issuing updates for 9.1 (so much for "5 years of
support") is almost never now. Just about everythign.
I am using this old EQ as I just don't have the business base to afford
additional hardware for the time being.
It appears you are biting off a very large chunk of work, over some very
complex networking applications, and it may a little overwhelming to
expect one person on a steep learning/re-learning curve to be able to
handle everything alone.
Yes, indeed. I agree. If anybody wants to send me an estimate with an
idea of costs I will consider it seriously.
It really is a simple setup, but it seems to be beyond me. I have
decided I am not going to configure email for the time being, so its
just bind and apache and virtual hosts.
Thank you all.
Scy