What Linux flavour should I use??? 4

[Hondy]

Hi

I want to run a commercial grade PHP web server, what Linux type should I get? I have very basic Linux skills but am very comfortable with the Windows equivalents and am aware of hosting risks.

I don't mind paying for it but it needs the following features installing and criteria:

*** must run on an HP DL 360 G5

*** Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP... so a LAMP would be ideal if this exists in all types of Linux.

*** My Linux skills aren't so good so a version that is easy to patch those LAMP security holes up with

*** packages should be easy to install (GD library etc)

*** is there such a thing as an RDP equivalent? (i'm not talking VNC, etc but session based non-console)

*** I will NOT be recompiling any kernals (i don't think???)

*** I'd also like to be able to clone it without it crashing horribly when I re-clone.

*** prefereably one with a GUI to manage the web service bindings etc.

Is there an obvious installation I should be looking at?

Thanks for taking the time - any other suggestions welcome.

Tall order or stick to Windows?

Cheers!

 

[RhythmAce]

This question always seems to get a good fight going. If you are looking for an enterprise class distro, the answer is Centos. It is RHEL5 with all of Redhat's branding and graphics removed. The distro is legal because linux is open source. What you pay for when you buy from Redhat is the support. It is hands down the most popular distro and rightly so. A lot of time goes into each version to make sure it is secure and works well as a whole. It comes with everything you need to setup almost any type of server. You would be hard pressed to find a hosting provider that disn't run either Redhat or Centos. You can find Centos at

http://www.centos.org

or Redhat at

http://www.redhat.com

 

[Hondy]

Perfect RhythmAce, that will be my first investigation!

 

[geirendre]

If you stick with the most used, and best documented
distros, you should be safe.
Candidates should include:
- Red Hat / Centos
- SUSE (Novell) /OpenSUSE
- Debian
- Ubuntu LTS

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/serveredition

RedHat and SUSE being the big pay-for-support alternatives,
and Centos, OpenSUSE, Debian and Ubuntu being the run-it-yourself,
learn as you go choices.
Ubuntu LTS also comes with an option for support from Canonical.

HTH

 

[Annihilannic]

Who needs support when there's Tek-Tips?

Annihilannic.

 

[thedaver]

What's Tek-Tips?


D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[Hondy]

Tek-Tips is what Support uses anyway

Centos then - watch this space for noob Linux questions

 

[Kozusnik]

While all of the distros listed above will work just fine, I've found that Ubuntu (Kubuntu - KDE defaulted desktop looks more like Windows than Gnome) is a perfect distro to start with. I have 6.06 LTS running on an HP 360 G5 as a LAMP which runs an Emergency Room Patient Tracking program I wrote. Mucho IO. Runs fine.

Once you're comfortable with the GUI, learn about "apt-get install" and "apt-cache search" from the command line. It is much faster than using a gui.

I hate sudo, so I always "sudo passwd root" and change the root password immediately.

As far as a full image...I've never tried. I use mysqldump and a few php scripts to backup what I need. You could set up mirroring using DRBD so you'll always have a hot spare.

http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat

Since it's a LAMP, I use phpMyAdmin for the MySQL databases.

Good luck and enjoy,
Mark

 

[Kozusnik]

I should mention mysqlhotcopy also. I use that for most of my scheduled backups.

Once you get that set up, you'll end up like the rest of us.
I have...
CentOS 5 - Asterisk
Red Hat 7.3 - HL7 Interfaces
Red Hat AS4 - new Interfaces
Fedora Core ? - Network Monitor
Mandrake 9.1 - current webserver (5 years old - will replace soon with Kubuntu)
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - ED Tracker
Red Hat AS4 - Zimbra e-mail server
Kubuntu 7.10 - My home and work PCs
Kubuntu 8.04 - My Laptop
SuSe ? - Ran on an AS/400, but we removed it since there was no need for it
Ubuntu 7.04 - Several Kiosks

There are a few others, but I can't think of them right now.

Later,
Mark

 

[Hondy]

Kosusnik - I have seen the Ubuntu LAMP and thats what I like, it actually asks you if you want a LAMP server which is kinda what I want. I was wondering if centos asks you this or whether you have to install all L.A.M.P. independently?

If your business depended on it would you use Ubuntu as you web server?

 

[RhythmAce]

The Centos installer will ask you which packages you want to install. There are actually hundreds to choose from but they are broken down into categories. So if you are not interested in all the development stuff, games or other non server packages, you simply don't check them. If you select just particular servers, the installer will make sure it also installs the packages (called dependencies)that those servers require. You also have a choice of level of security such as firewall and selinux. If you plan on using this for a public server, I can't stress enough how important stability and security are. The problem with many distros is that they try to be easy to use for the Windows user. They also want to be on top by providing the latest updates. All this does is put you out there on what we call the bleeding edge. Many new system administrators put way too much trust in their firewall. Keep this in mind, it is not the people you keep out that can hurt you, it's those you let in. Let's say you have just installed the latest version of mysql. Then you find out that apache hasn't been tweaked yet to play nice with this latest version. So you need to come up with a patch or workaround. In the mean time you find out that there is a vulnerability in the new mysql server. Now you have a potential for attacks through this port. If you just want to learn linux by easing into it. Then any distro will do and you may as well use the one that will make this transition the easiest. But if you are building something you know is going to be coming under attack, why start with something you will be patching and maybe even downgrading to get it to both work and be secure. I am not saying that these other distros are not what you want. Just read up on securing your linux server and do a google for hosting providers and see what they are using. Until I know better, I'd follow the big boys.

 

[Hondy]

Rhythm, thats exactly what I mean. I want a publicly available server that i don't have to "tweak", as far as I'm concerned a LAMP should by default be hard and you should have to tweak it the other way. Windows actually is doing it the right way, these days you cant do anything unless you allow it to first.
Like firewalls that have the "implicit deny all" this should be the default, not the other way around as that would be ridiculous.

What sort of tweaks are you talking about? A fully patched Apache server should not for example be able to run commands that can access the MySQL db in any other way than was intended. OK save for poorly written web scripts.

In Windows you have to enable even ASP before it will work, so what "misconfigurations" might be there for convience to the windows user that would cause issues?

 

[RhythmAce]

You have much to learn young jedi. Windows does not do it "the right way". First off you pay thousands of dollars for their server software, then pay through the nose to make it secure. One day when you are broke and asking yourself why you have to keep rebooting the server, perhaps then you will see why linux is the only way to go. Getting back to your statement about LAMP. That sounds too much like WAMP which is something you use as a personal or local server. This type of server is used for software development purposes or configuring scripts before going live on a production server. As I said earlier, you have a choice fo which packages you want to install. If you simply want to install apache, mysql and php, you will find that there is a lot more you're going to need. For example, how are you going to admin your server? You will need to access it some how. Even if you want to do everything from the command line, you will still need to install a shell. A shell is in Windows terms a "dos prompt". This is what allows you to run shell scripts or enter commands. If you know very little about linux then you may want to install a desktop environment. You have two to choose from, gnome and kde. This is what gives it the GUI but for this to work you need to install the Xserver. The Xserver (X11) is what makes it possible to not only have a GUI but also be able to use a mouse and other I/O devices. People will need to be able to upload there web pages to the server so you will need an ftp server. Whether you want a mail server or not, many php scripts require one to use the built-in mail() functions. So you may need to install a mail server. I can go on and on but you get the idea. A server is more than just apache, mysql and php. Most distros come with an istaller. This installer walks you through the install and makes it easy. It will even partition and format the drive(s) for you. Linux requires at least three partitions, "/" called root, "/boot" and "/swap". Regaurdless of the distro, each server will need to be configured. Most com with a configuration file you can edit. In most cases, then end in .conf. I'm not trying to scare ya. In fact I'm trying to ease you mind by letting you know that almost any linux distro will walk you through the install and will set defaults for you automatically. They even have pretty much the same packages. The difference in them is the layout of the directories. Some have older versions of those packages but I already explained why earlier so I won't do it here. Just pick one you like and remember you always have us. ;-)

 

[Hondy]

are all Linux user all ex-Windows users?

I don't think Linux users will ever agree that Windows is actually a good system, like everything it has its problems but it is popular for a reason. If you'll notice, Linux systems are ever drifting towards how Windows looks and feels.

But i'm kinda in the lions den to be arguing this hehe - just kidding of course.

Ok, so admin (not accessible to the outside world) - I take it there is no RDP equivalent, the closest is going to be something like VNC? And file access is going to happen over FTP or Samba thinking about it.

Mail, good point! I guess I can't just turn on the SMTP service and configure it.

Running PHP on Windows is starting to look attractive :S

 

[geirendre]

but it is popular for a reason

Yepp, that reason being Windows is preinstalled on every PC
that's shipped out to customers all over the place.
If they were installed with Ubuntu instead, don't you
think that Ubuntu would have been "popular" to?

 

[Hondy]

why don't they pre-install with Linux I wonder?

 

[RhythmAce]

why don't they pre-install with Linux I wonder?

They do if you are buying a server. If it is a laptop or desktop, you will have to ask for it explicitly. If you want a Windows server then it is the opposite. You will need to pay heap big wampum. Make no mistake. I am not taliking about windows as a desktop environment. Linux is not even close in that department and Mac is their only competition. I have been talking strictly servers here. This is, after all, the linux (server) forum. There is also a linux (client/desktop) forum. Most distros of linux can be setup to run as both environments. In other words it can be set to run in different modes called run levels. For example if you are new to linux and don't feel comfortable working from the shell, you can have it boot into run level 5 (graphics mode). There you can use gui configuation tools to configure your servers. You can also access the shell (command prompt), through a terminal window very much the same way you do it in Windows. For just about anything that runs on Windows, you can find a free open source version to run on linux. The price you pay for all this is great gobs of memory which will slow down a server big time. Enter run level 3. This is called server mode and boots without graphics or mouse services. If something happens where you need to the graphics mode post haste, you just type startx at the command line and prestochangeo you have it without even having to reboot. The nice thing about linux is that you will find you can make just about any change and you just have to restart the deamon you're working on and not have to reboot the whole system.

 

[Kozusnik]

Mention WAMP lest ye be banished!!!

First of all, yes I would use Ubuntu/Kubuntu as my mission critical webserver. Actually we will within the next few weeks...as soon as my servers arrive. Like I said, it's used now for our "Emergency Room Tracker" which is a LAMP on Ubuntu.

I will be using a cluster with the next setup. The hardware can always go bad no matter the OS.

Of course, I must add...
Depending on what you use a desktop for, Linux is an extremely viable replacement for Winwoes. I've been using it solely for years. I'm not much of a gamer, but I did install Cedega to play a game every now and then.

As for the partitions, some distros don't even require a /boot. While it's still a good idea, you could just have:
/ - All of your disk minus swap
/swap - 1.5 - 2 times your physical RAM

/boot will just end up as a folder under the root '/'.

There are also Apache, MySQL, PHP, PERL, etc. forums on Tek-Tips, so there's always help.

Later,
Mark

 

[shoalcreek]

This is a tough question. It's a lot like asking what ice cream flavor you should get at the Dairy Queen.

Anyway, I am partial to the Debian line of distros. I like Debian a lot. But I also wonder if it is a good one for a beginner.

Debian has the apt package management system. This beats rpm hands down. It resolves dependencies quite well. It's easy to learn and use.

Also, Debian gives you the command line when you start out and that's about it. You install every package as you need it. It is much easier to install packages as you need them than to remove ones that you don't need. When you use something like RedHat or SuSE, you end up with lots of packages that you don't need.

As a result, Debian will work on a machine with the minimum hardware.

I highly recommend that you talk with your local Linux users group (LUG) if there is one in your area.

 

[shoalcreek]

why don't they pre-install with Linux I wonder?

Microsoft has cut lots of good deals. In many respects, this goes back to MS's dealings with IBM. IBM was the standard bearer for PC's. IBM sold Microsoft, so Microsoft became the standard.

Another reason for MS's popularity is that many technical decisions in businesses are still made by people who don't know what they are doing. CEO wants Microsoft. His IT department says that something else is better. CEO wins because he's the CEO.

There is also the desire for interoperability. There will never be a lot of office suites or operating systems for this reason. People want to be able to share documents and things with others. People have the idea: "Everybody else is using it."

Hardware manufacturers have been kissing up to Bill Gates for years. They don't want to do anything that may upset Bill.

IBM was the most pro-Linux hardware vendor. Why was that? They simply got fed up with Microsoft breaking too many agreements with them.