Seems like getting back to this diary might be a good idea.
Now that I'm doing tech stuff full time I have so many
threads going on I can barely keep straight what I've done
and what I need to do.
Looking at my last post, I was just putting together my
first real Zope server. I got the thing running on Debian
on the blue and white G3. It worked great using Squishdot
and ZWiki with the teachers through the summer. They took
to ZWiki particularly well. I did a major revision to the
site at the beginning of the year when I switched to the
Zope Content Management System (CMF). That was a little
rough, and frankly made things less effective, because there
were now too many things to do, instead of just having a
simple choice of weblog stuff and wiki stuff.
I eventually gave the Mac to the music teacher, which was
probably a mistake, but it was a gesture of goodwill, since
she was new and there wasn't actually any musical equipment
in the school. So I moved over onto a Pentium (350mhz-ish)
box with a scsi card and Red Hat, which I'm more comfortable
with.
That worked fine. Then we got a few new motherboards with
Pentium 4 1600mhz's to replace some that fried themeselves,
so we put one of those in the webserver. As Zope 2.5 and
CMF 1.2 have come out recently, I figured I'd do a ground up
reinstall. I have also been playing at home with two source
based distributions, Sorcerer and Gentoo. I've got Gentoo
running on my desktop box, but I decided that Sorcerer would
be perfect for the webserver, because it gives the
administrator the most transparent control over the system.
Aside: Sorcerer vs. Debian
Debian and Sorcerer are similar insofar as they don't
provide the kind of graphical configuration tools that Red
Hat, Suse, and Mandrake do. I think what has always given
me trouble with Debian is its community aspect--which seems
bizarre to say. The thing is, there is a whole learning
curve for the lingo and traditions, like
stable/unstable/testing, woody/potato, the peristence of
really shitty tools like dselect. I know it all makes sense
once you learn it, but that's something else to learn.
Plus on the P4, recompiling everything locally with
optimizations seems to make a big difference
So anyhow, I've got the Sorcerer system mostly setup, and
I'm feeling good about it. It is blazingly fast and doesn't
have anything running that I don't need. I've been working
on getting iptables running properly. Sad to say my boxes
have been pretty damn insecure up to this point, but it
looks like I'll have a proper packet filtering system
running here momentarily.