Networking Question from the current Pro's

[tnguy]

So thanks again to all, and for the suggestion by McGyver and tnguy for that suggested solution. Free is always better.

 

I warn you, first one's free but it's all designed to draw you in. Amazon raises some "a bit too big" flags but (once you get past the free tier) their prices are very attractive. Though your site may not need to go that way.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

This thread is interesting though I'm retarded on server/web topics. I can program apps and dll's and drivers, but never studied servers much and apparently it is something that actually requires a person to know the subject matter.

A few years ago was tasked to make a web app running on a remote hosted win server. The app was easy but getting it to work embedded in the win server caused serious brain damage. It was a copy protect authorization app, which in principle ought to have been fairly rudimentary and it was blowing my fuses. So a complicated app would drive me nuts. Server stuff just seems like complete gibberish.

I've paid for a shared server or virtual server or whatever with netfirms for many years. Never did much with it. Can't stay interested for long enough stretches. But it costs less than $200 a year, doesn't seem to have much down time, doesn't seem especially slow, and has what seem real generous storage and bandwidth limits. The company has a big suite of approved packages for the typical stuff. All you have to do is click a button to install a package and then learn how to use the packages, many of which seem rather arcane and bass ackwards to my network retarded brain. They have several forum softwares to choose from, though never tried to set one up.

The limitation is that you can't write and install yer own apps except for various scripting and web languages, and so you can't install and compile "un approved" packages. That has only been a limitation to me because occasionally had a hankering to install a revision control system and/or a bug tracking system, and there are none of those in the big menu of thangs they offer. But considering the pain I endured trying to install my authorization system on that win server, dunno if I'd have the patience to set one up from scratch.

Security seems such a can of worms nowadays. I mainly use the space for yet another remote file storage, but the public web pages had just a little php and it got hacked, so I removed all the html, locked down permissions on the folders, uninstalled php and other scripting support, and put up a few pages of vanilla html. Made the site too dumb to offer many hacking opportunities (I hope).

Boggles the mind how TGO David can put up something as complex as TGO and keep it secure.

I wish there was a dumb secure content management system that would operate about the same as a forum messaging system. I can get across any content I'd care to author by using the facilities of writing a thread message on TGO-- Formatted text, audio, image, and video links. A 'blog system' that involved no more maintenance than writing a forum message to put up a new page would be simple enough that maybe I'd add more content to the site.

Have looked at blog software and content managemment systems, but they generally seem too overbuilt and labor intensive, and offering too many potential security holes.

The public pages of my netfirms account can be viewed at-- http://www.errnum.com

The data and bandwidth limits of netfirms biz account seem plenty generous enough to put up a modest forum, if somebody had the patience to do the work, but dunno nothin about it, as can be plainly seen.

[tnguy]

Lester: Have you looked at Wordpress? It seems fairly straightforward. I set one up myself but I find I rarely have a desire to share the minutiae of my life. I sometimes find out something I think it would be worth sharing with others though.

[Guest TankerHC]

Lester: Have you looked at Wordpress? It seems fairly straightforward. I set one up myself but I find I rarely have a desire to share the minutiae of my life. I sometimes find out something I think it would be worth sharing with others though.

 

Your right about that. Wordpress takes me all of 5 minutes to set up. If you use their skins and app's maybe 10. Most Hosts now there isnt even a need to download and setup then upload. No need for an ftp client at all, its part of simple scripts built right into the Control Panel. Click it, wait 5 minutes and its set up, take another 5 to configure it how you like it.

[MacGyver]

This thread is interesting though I'm retarded on server/web topics. I can program apps and dll's and drivers, but never studied servers much and apparently it is something that actually requires a person to know the subject matter.

A few years ago was tasked to make a web app running on a remote hosted win server. The app was easy but getting it to work embedded in the win server caused serious brain damage. It was a copy protect authorization app, which in principle ought to have been fairly rudimentary and it was blowing my fuses. So a complicated app would drive me nuts. Server stuff just seems like complete gibberish.

I've paid for a shared server or virtual server or whatever with netfirms for many years. Never did much with it. Can't stay interested for long enough stretches. But it costs less than $200 a year, doesn't seem to have much down time, doesn't seem especially slow, and has what seem real generous storage and bandwidth limits. The company has a big suite of approved packages for the typical stuff. All you have to do is click a button to install a package and then learn how to use the packages, many of which seem rather arcane and bass ackwards to my network retarded brain. They have several forum softwares to choose from, though never tried to set one up.

The limitation is that you can't write and install yer own apps except for various scripting and web languages, and so you can't install and compile "un approved" packages. That has only been a limitation to me because occasionally had a hankering to install a revision control system and/or a bug tracking system, and there are none of those in the big menu of thangs they offer. But considering the pain I endured trying to install my authorization system on that win server, dunno if I'd have the patience to set one up from scratch.

Security seems such a can of worms nowadays. I mainly use the space for yet another remote file storage, but the public web pages had just a little php and it got hacked, so I removed all the html, locked down permissions on the folders, uninstalled php and other scripting support, and put up a few pages of vanilla html. Made the site too dumb to offer many hacking opportunities (I hope).

Boggles the mind how TGO David can put up something as complex as TGO and keep it secure.

I wish there was a dumb secure content management system that would operate about the same as a forum messaging system. I can get across any content I'd care to author by using the facilities of writing a thread message on TGO-- Formatted text, audio, image, and video links. A 'blog system' that involved no more maintenance than writing a forum message to put up a new page would be simple enough that maybe I'd add more content to the site.

Have looked at blog software and content managemment systems, but they generally seem too overbuilt and labor intensive, and offering too many potential security holes.

The public pages of my netfirms account can be viewed at-- http://www.errnum.com

The data and bandwidth limits of netfirms biz account seem plenty generous enough to put up a modest forum, if somebody had the patience to do the work, but dunno nothin about it, as can be plainly seen.

Have you got a GitHub account? I screwed around with several version control systems over the years - everything from small self hosted packages up to TFS. There's a learning curve to get, but it's good and is about as close to free as you can get.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Thanks McGyver, will look that up.

I'm very ignorant of the VCS universe. Several open source projects I follow use SVN, so when I was thinking about it, was thinking SVN.

A netherlands fellow, young linux wizard we hire on occasion for nerdy programming we are too dumb to do (particularly on mac) offered to install an SVN system on my netfirms acct, except as I mentioned, those kind of accts let you do a lot, but don't let you install any "un approved" software, and they never got around to approving any VCS.

I placed a request for them to add SVN to their available package list, but as of last time I looked they have never got around to it.

Our group of programmers is small enough that we get along without bug tracker and version control systems, but at one time I figgered if I was to set one up, the other guys might warm to using it.

[tnguy]

Lester, once you start using version control, you won't go back. I've used subversion a fair bit but it looks like I'm going to be doing a crash course in Git myself as it's a big part of the AWS strategy my company is taking.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Lester, once you start using version control, you won't go back. I've used subversion a fair bit but it looks like I'm going to be doing a crash course in Git myself as it's a big part of the AWS strategy my company is taking.

Thanks tnguy. It would be at least educational to learn more about it.

Don't mean to imply that everybody in the company is as dumb on internet as I am. We have a few app programmers that don't know much about web stuff, a couple of web guys who maintain a pretty big online sales and company forum with sections in most languages, a few office folks, tech support and sales people.

Last time I looked, they were running the company web site and forum on some dedicated servers at a server farm. A lot of our files are pretty big and they found it convenient to hire a bunch of cheap ISP accounts and spread the download files between numerous $10 or $20 per month accts so that none of the accounts go over the monthly bandwidth limit. IOW when a customer buys a big product, the files get downloaded from an assortment of those cheap accts. Or maybe they are doing something else lately, haven't asked recently.

The owner is our most productive programmer, super bright fella, but he is a retired-early MD who never took a programming course in his life, which didn't keep him from making a lot of money. But we've gone for over 20 years with ftp and file compare software, and it works good enough that he's never got real interested in doing it some other "modern" way.

Our bug tracker is one of the tech support guys who maintains a server directory containing up-to-date bug lists and example files. So if I want to look at the current bugs I just download whatever is in his folder.

That netfirms acct is mostly a toy I play with sometimes, and file storage. Sometimes I'll install one of their packages and play with it till I lose patience. :) Only mentioned it because it appears a viable way to put up a small forum if somebody had the patience to learn how. They have a lot of stuff you can install with just a couple of button clicks, pre configured to work on their servers.

[Sam1]

I use dreamhost.com for multiple forums, and am on their shared plan... unlimited everything and speed is pretty good.  one of the forums sees about 10,000 hits a day and there's never any issue, nor have I considered paying for a dedicated server.

 

check them out before you start looking at expensive solutions.

[tnguy]

Last time I looked, they were running the company web site and forum on some dedicated servers at a server farm. A lot of our files are pretty big and they found it convenient to hire a bunch of cheap ISP accounts and spread the download files between numerous $10 or $20 per month accts so that none of the accounts go over the monthly bandwidth limit. IOW when a customer buys a big product, the files get downloaded from an assortment of those cheap accts. Or maybe they are doing something else lately, haven't asked recently.

Amazon S3. Depending on your requirements. There are a few other options that are also reasonable but it's just nearly impossible to beat Amazon right now.
 

Our bug tracker is one of the tech support guys who maintains a server directory containing up-to-date bug lists and example files. So if I want to look at the current bugs I just download whatever is in his folder.

You definitely want something that gives more of a workflow. At the current place, they use Jira but the previous place they used a version of Mantis that had been heavily modified (by me) but the base version should at least give you something to get started with.

You'll find that between version control and more disciplined tracking of bugs, your workflow will be greatly improved. It'll also open doors that you didn't even consider before.

It's not just for big projects and teams. I find these immensely useful just for myself. They also are invaluable as part of disaster recovery planning. (Just this Tuesday we had a critical guy not show up for work dead).

And for what it's worth, I'm always a bit skeptical about the latest whizz-bang thing myself (except when I'm not) but good ideas are good ideas. Edited February 23, 2014 by tnguy

[Guest Lester Weevils]

You definitely want something that gives more of a workflow. At the current place, they use Jira but the previous place they used a version of Mantis that had been heavily modified (by me) but the base version should at least give you something to get started with.

You'll find that between version control and more disciplined tracking of bugs, your workflow will be greatly improved. It'll also open doors that you didn't even consider before.

 

Did some hours of reading on it sunday. Git does look potentially better than svn. Have only used svn lightly, and only with command lines in the terminal.

 

Have used mantis on some open source projects, but only a bit. Looks like mantis has become a fairly common "one click install" on cheap shared servers nowadays, but apparently svn is more problematic to run on a shared server, or maybe it would be more commonly seen in that setting. Found a page where dreamhost users have been using svn on shared servers. Not being conversant on linux server details, the install documentation looks like a great way to lose some sleep and lose some brain cells. :) http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Subversion

 

Have occasionally thought that setting up a pet server at my home office could be a learning opportunity, even if I didn't connect it to the internet. There would be the tasks of learning how to set up and config a linux server, then the task of installing the software, configuring the software, then learning how to use the damn thang and get some practical use out of it.

 

Been a couple of years since studying the virtual machine catalog at the VMWare site. Last time I looked at it, didn't appear to have much of immediate use to me. This weekend found the turnkeylinux site which looks promising. They have lots of useful-looking vm's, available in several formats including ready-to-run vm's (compatible with several virtualizers including VMWare), and identical supposedly "easy to install" versions to blast onto hardware from ISO image. That might let me get my feet wet on a pre-configured virtual machine, reducing the initial learning curve. Would only have to learn software config and learn how to use it. Which in itself would involve some work.

 

They have several bug-tracker vm's including mantis, and several revision control VM's. Some of the more interesting ones include--

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/revision-control

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/trac

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/mantis

 

If I could run one of the VMs on the Mac Pro or other puter locally, get our software projects set up and learn to use it. Then a followup step might be to expose the local server on the web, just visible enough for co-workers to play with it (programmers several places in the world, home office is in Victoria BC). And then if they were to like it, I could send the modified VM for them to run on a main office server. Or let em install to hardware and import the database files.

 

Sounds like a "part-time project" that would take awhile. :)

Edited February 25, 2014 by Lester Weevils