Time flies when you have to rebuild your web server at least 10 times...

The last month took forever in one regard, and in another it went by fast.  I was running Ubuntu 12.04 and that came up on EOL (End of Life) the first week of August and in reading about the upgrade I decided NOT to upgrade to the next level of Ubuntu (was reading something about them not using a LTS (Long Term Support) release for their kernel so I decided to move away from that).

My first attempt was to go to Centos 6.  The install was very simple and had the server up pretty quickly.  The difficulty came with getting Aegir up and running.  After several failed attempts and troubleshooting opportunities I finally got somethings up and running but it turned out things were not all that user friendly. I did try but it seemed that everytime I'd make a change the whole system would break and I'd end up starting over again.  

During the 3rd weekend of July there was DrupalCampWI (in Madison).  It was a very good experience though I ended up not arriving as early as I planned.

It was a slow field service week so when a job came up on Friday morning I felt obliged to take it which meant I did not get to leave for Madison till 12 noon which meant a 3:00pm arrival. I got to sit in on one session that day.  I was looking forward to networking with people after the sessions but when I came out from the last session, everyone was gone so I ended up having a quiet evening.  Saturday was a much better day in that regard.  I got to talk and visit with people through breakfast and lunch and after the final session I went out to dinner with several people before driving home.

The reason for relating to all that was that in the dinner conversation the subject of Aegircame up and I was given some advise that was meant to make life simplier and easier (?).  One of the people suggested I Install BOA which is Barracuda, Octapuss and Aegir. Supposedly that is the most stable way of running Aegir.  

With that advice I set out to do just that.  Unfortunately I discovered after another server install that BOA is not compatible with Centos (at least not without having to do it completely manual and then having to figure everything out myself).  I did not feel up to that task so I made the move from Centos 6 to Debian 7.6. As it turns out there is an automatic install script for Debian so it was a no-brainer to make the decision to change OS's.

The first install took forever because I had it install the GUI interface (which I quit doing after that initial install), and my attempt was successful.  I got things running and then I preceeded to break it, time after time I rebuilt the server and reinstalled Aegir, and each time the install got faster and more streamlined.  

One thing that I learned through all the troubleshooting was how well csf (ConfigServer Security & Firewall) works.  It is "a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, Login/Intrusion Detection and Security application for Linux servers."  This means it looks at the traffic and can take preventative action if your Server should come under attack.  I had to go in and exclude my IP because I kept getting locked out because of login difficulties I was having from time to time <LOL>.

I have finally got things up and running and learned a few things I did not know before (which is a good thing I guess).  Now I'm finally ready to get back to learning Drupal rather than learning LINUX, and BOA.