Real Ultimate Power

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#1 Wed, 09/19/2007 - 15:22
PlayGod

Real Ultimate Power

We use Webmin on several of the older boxes at work, where I mostly do website development and client support on our cPanel servers. I was really excited to find out about Virtualmin, so I had fun setting up an old PIII 800mhz 512ram sandbox server with CentOS, Webmin and Virtualmin GPL rpm's. I have never built a box from scratch, so I was really surprised that it really was "Voila, Webserver". I got DNS, email and 2 domain working very quickly using the info on your forum, FAQ's and Wiki. It's LAMP for Lamebrains. Thanks!

Now I'm ready to build something more serious for my close clients, non-profits and personal sites.

Here's what I'll be running:

~ 20 virtual hosts

[ul][li]3x Joomla CMS[/li] [li]3x phpBB with around 10,000 total users[/li] [li]2x Wordpress[/li] [li]1x Textpattern[/li] [li]3x Gallery2[/li][/ul]

My bandwidth for all of these sites combined is in the neighborhood of 250 gb/mo.

The sites are on various hosts, all of which I will dump with the exception of a Dreamhost nonprofit account that the most important site is running on. I'll keep that account for offsite backups and would also like to use it as a mirror/failsafe incase my local blows up.

Here's my "ultimate setup" question. I will have no problem getting the server up and running, but what do I need to turn on, turn off, install, and configure staying mainly within Web/Virtualmin?

I will be getting:

[ul][li]Dell PowerEdge 1750[/li] [li]DUAL Pentium 4 2.8GHz Xeon[/li]
[li]4GB ECC DDR[/li]
[li]3X146GB w/Onboard PERC ARRAY controller[/li] [li]Dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet[/li][/ul]

This will be co-lo'd at my work on our dual redundant DS-3's.

I'll be behind a m0n0wall configured by my sysadmin, but want to run everything else on my box.

Can Squid help me running on this box? If so, can you be specific about config and deployment?

How can I achieve a mirror to the Dreamhost account? (Duh, I know nothing, I'm assuming I just use them as backup nameservers? How to synchronize the db's? -- not too worried about session state, just data redundancy and availability of sites & forums)

My sysadmin is a bonafide Linux brainiac, so no worries if I get in too deep.

[img size=150]http://www.echonews.com/838/images/movie_austin_powers.jpg[/img] Pimp my ride. <br><br>Post edited by: PlayGod, at: 2007/09/19 15:54

Fri, 09/21/2007 - 17:48
PlayGod

OK, now the deal has changed, the seller offered us different hardware, so now I'm going in with 3 associates on a Dell 2650 dual 2.6 4gb and a Dell 4650 dual 2.8 with 4gb. Basically the dude traded me up on the deal because I am picking up locally and the bigger servers are a mint to ship to distant buyers. $1200.00 for the kit.

There will be 13 drives totaling about 1tb. We're thinking redundancy, backups, and a couple of hot-swaps so we stay recoverable with that many used SCSI drives.

One of the partners has a cpanel license, but the other guys are all Webmin. Things are up in the air as to what we'll do, but we may just move all of the close &amp; personal projects to a Web/Vmin cluster and leave the stuff that needs client access on the old cpanel server.

Mon, 09/24/2007 - 00:00
Joe
Joe's picture

<div class='quote'>Here's my &quot;ultimate setup&quot; question. I will have no problem getting the server up and running, but what do I need to turn on, turn off, install, and configure staying mainly within Web/Virtualmin?</div>

If you're using our install script: Nothing. Install the OS, update it with the OS standard package manager, run install.sh. Wait a few minutes. You're done.

If you're doing it manually...well, you'll have to install and configure everything. I'm not a fan of this method. ;-)

<div class='quote'>Can Squid help me running on this box? If so, can you be specific about config and deployment?</div>

I dunno. It depends. First step is usually to figure out where the bottlenecks lie. Joomla is a hard one to cache, as it's kinda stupid about cache-control headers. You can, of course, off-load images and support files to a cacheable server--but you could also choose to run them from a super-fast tiny dedicated server like lightttpd or ngenix (or even a well-tuned Apache instance, without any of the complex stuff).

As for being specific...again, that depends. If you google my name and squid (joe cooper squid) you'll find that I'm extremely well-qualified to make suggestions. But you've gotta be specific about what you're trying to accomplish (&quot;fast website&quot; isn't really being specific). Identify the problem, and then we'll figure out the solution. Without a problem, we'd just be guessing, and I hate guessing.

<div class='quote'>How can I achieve a mirror to the Dreamhost account? (Duh, I know nothing, I'm assuming I just use them as backup nameservers? How to synchronize the db's? -- not too worried about session state, just data redundancy and availability of sites &amp; forums)</div>

rsync the data. Obviously, because Dreamhost uses their own proprietary (and rather limited) control panel, you can't sync things up in the way you would with multiple Virtualmin systems. But you can probably manage to copy the data over and maybe even make a version of the sites that could limp along until the primaries return to service.

As for databases, you'll either need to setup a ndb table (Virtualmin supports this, but Dreamhost almost certainly won't, and they definitely won't handle management of tables and dbs across the cluster), or perform a regular dump/restore.

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Mon, 09/24/2007 - 09:12
PlayGod

<a href='http://swelltech.com/support/webminguide/' target='_blank'>Thank you</a>, Joe.

Mon, 09/24/2007 - 11:53 (Reply to #4)
Joe
Joe's picture

<div class='quote'>Thank you, Joe.</div>

No problem. But, even better, my book and Jamie's have both been wikified over at doxfer.com, and we've even started updating them. You can find them here:

http://doxfer.com/Webmin

You can join up and help out. (&quot;doxfer: docs for you, docs for me&quot;, get it?) ;-)

There's a wiki for Usermin, as well at /Usermin . Virtualmin, of course, is documented in our Virtualmin.com wiki at http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/ (and, likewise, you can help out with it, as well...wikis are docs for the peoples by the peoples).

We like wikis.

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