Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I should really have spent the day unpacking (just back from a lovely holiday in the Malverns), but instead the suitcase is still sat in the front room downstairs; I’ve been busy making some more changes to the very experimental LAMP Server seed.

The first experimental version of the LAMP Server is starting to take shape. We now have an embryonic profile (seeds/lamp-server/release-1), which may or may not completely hose your box (you have been warned!) I’ve also added a few packages in seeds-extra/; hopefully they’re starting to demonstrate my thinking on how we could handle the “value-added” bits of seeds. All of the “value-added” bits are currently managed by an experimental SEEDS_EXTRA USE_EXPAND variable. I tried having them as normal USE flags first, but it’s much clearer what’s going on since switching to the USE_EXPAND. Thanks to Donnie for his explaination of how USE_EXPAND works.

I’ve written up some (incomplete) instructions on how to install the LAMP Server seed on an existing Gentoo box. The main steps that I know for sure are missing are instructions for adding init scripts to the default runlevel. If you find any more steps that are missing, please add a comment at the bottom of the instructions.

I’ve kicked off a discussion about what package the LAMP Server should choose for server monitoring. Myself, I normally deploy cacti, which is great for general graphing, but doesn’t support the whole ’service up/down’ type monitoring that you’d also get from (say) nagios.

The security side of things definitely needs a lot more work too. We need to pick a firewall package and an IDS for starters. I’ve picked denyhosts to handle SSH log monitoring; should we be using something else instead? I’d also like to develop a tenshi configuration for the LAMP Server; does anyone currently have a working tenshi config file that we could use as a starting point?

Also on my current TODO list is making sure Rails is really well supported. Last time I checked, we didn’t have mongrel in Portage; that needs packaging up. The LAMP Server seed currently uses Apache 2.2, specifically to make it much easier to support Rails/Mongrel. We’ll also need to look into updating the capistrano ebuild, and seeing what else is needed to make capistrano work well on a LAMP Server (Aled - expect me to camp at your desk with a notebook when I return to work )