awkward silence

Some time ago I decided I’d really like to have an environment at home that mirrors a DreamHost server to enable me to do more testing and get a look under the covers at the various config options.

I also wanted to have a Trac install for clubrs.org.

I had a PIII with a 20GB drive and 512MB ram that I’d just retired from family use and it seemed a perfect candidate.

I really wanted 2 features in this server: security and ease of administration. The only machine I’ve had hacked was a Red Hat server and it was because I didn’t keep up with security releases. I want that to be as automatic as possible – I’m a developer, not a system admin.

I thought about going with FreeBSD since that seems to be popular with Rails developers and also is known as a secure OS. I also thought about Ubuntu for ease of use, but since DreamHost uses Debian I went that direction. So far at least, I’m very glad I did.

I’ll post a few articles covering the process: the trade-offs in OSes, the download/install process and setting up Trac.

The conclusion is that I’m very happy with Debian. In large part because it is a popular enough distribution that there are how-tos for everything and they seem to be very up to date. It installed easily and managing and updating packages is easy.

More to come….