Introduction

Here is the, the long awaited second part of my extensive guide on setting up a rails server running on Ubuntu 8.04. Everything should be going smoothly so far and you should be at the point where we need to setup Apache and link everything together. This guide will be quite verbose and much longer than the first one. This is due mostly to all the configuration that will be required. That being said I will contemplate making a third part of this guide that will cover the version control and capistrano recipes. Your thoughts are greatly apreciated, esecially if you want me to cover any other features or topics after you finish reading this guide.

As pointed out by a reader, some people may not have read part 1 yet. Click here to read Part 1 of this guide.

Introduction

So before my monstrous OpenSolaris 2008.05 post on setting up a Ruby on Rails server I decided to write a guide on setting up a Ubuntu 8.04 server guide for all you Slicehost users! I decided to write this guide because of the new optimized kernel that was added to Ubuntu Server 8.04 for virtualized environments. I also wanted a complete guide that would be a solid reference and now just have bits and pieces for upcoming sysadmins will get lost when reading.

For simplicity I will start with a black machine and build upon that. Use the comments section for specific questions or starting points. I will try to do my best at answering any and all questions.

Requirements

This section will go over the simple requirements of the entire setup.

Hardware

Ubuntu 8.04 Server - This could be anything below:

• Slicehost
• VMware
• Bare Metal Install

Software

• Apache 2.2.8
• MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite3
• Git
• Ruby
• Rubygems
  • Rails
  • Capistrano
  • RSpec
  • Passenger

We are in the process of migrating our blog to Typo 5 and Rails 2.0. Please bare with us while we make this transition and we will be back with even more exciting stories and posts.

-Ron

Introduction

Slicehost is a virtual private server (VPS or Slice) provider that is built on top of Xen Source. They have built their own management interface for Xen called SliceManager. Slicehost is SysAdmins' Chronicles hosting provider and has been for the last three months. This article will review SliceManger, SliceHost as a VPS provider, and our overall experiance with them so far.

Cost

The currect costs as of October 29th, 2007 are:

Source: http://www.slicehost.com

SysAdmins' Chronicles is currently using the smallest plan, 256slice.

Introduction

There are three major types of virtualization that are put into use almost every day in computing. Each of these make our lifes both easier and more painful. I will be talking about VMware and Xen because of them being the leaders in enterprise virtualization while also offering a free products to use.

The three main types of virtualization are:

• Full-Virtualization
• Paravirtualization
• Application Virtualization

Full Virtualization

Most of VMware products use the full-virtualization implementation because of its capability to completely isolate itself from the host machine.

IMPORTANT: This is not totally true, there is a great podcast from Paul Dot Com which explains the possibilities of breaking out of a guest virtual machine into the host machine

Paravirtualization

Xen on the other hand implements Paravirtualization which enables for a still secure but optimized interaction between the guest and the hardware. This is because the kernel used in the guest must be ported to implement the API calls to the Xen Kernel.

Application Virtualization

This virtualization occurs at the application layer. A great example of this type of virtualization is the Java Virtual Machine. There is a layer where the java applications interact with and the Java Virtual Machine actually handles the interation with the operating system itself.

Introduction.

Amazon offers a great data storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3. It is a low cost, highly available service that charges by the Gigabyte stored and transfered. There are a number of utilities that have integrated support for Amazon S3. Duplicity is one of them. It integrates support for Amazon S3, among other storage methods, with rdiff. In all, duplicity allows an effective way to do incremental encrypted backups.

Below you will find the steps to setup backing up to Amazon S3 with Dupliciy. Included is my own Perl script that can be used to run the backup unintended with Cron. The script also includes support to dump a PostgreSQL database before the backup commences, and then include it in the backup to S3. It also supports emailing any number of people with notifications of completed backups as well as any errors. Feel free to post in the comments any questions or bugs you find. Enjoy.

Steps

• Install Duplicity
• Create GPG Key
• Sign up for Amazon S3
• Example Perl Script for Backup

To list all installed packages in Ubuntu, simply run the following command:

 dpkg --get-selections

Thats it.