As the Internet expands and more companies start using the web,
people are using Linux and other software to provide the infrastrucure
needed. Three of those software packages are
they are great products, but recently a company named nuSphere has
bundled them all together in an easy to install and use package.
The first thing I noticed about the bundle was the supplemental materials that came
with the CD. I was very pleased to see the inclusion of the Perl,PHP
and Apache O\’Reilly references, very good choice of documention to
include. Plus the NuSphere MySQL manual was a nicely bound copy of
the mysql docs with their own additons. Very handy.
The software is installed via web browser, which makes for an easy
job as well as simple remote installation on boxes that do\’t have
monitors or run X. After starting the installation script, you are presented with the option of quick or custom install. The quick installation does everything for you while the custom option lets you specify where to install and what components to use. For some systems that already have Perl, you may not want to install the version that comes on the CD in order to avoid version conflicts.
NuSphere uses webmin to assist
in the administration of your server. It is installed by default, and
is very good, however webmin runs as root and has root level access,
but you are never prompted to set a password. So the user needs to
make sure to do that before they move on. Also, the default user has
access to everything from init script, to network settings to mounted
devices. My suggestion would be to add a second webmin user \’nusphere\’
that has only the apache and mysql modules enabled so that the
webmaster doesn\’t have access to the system configuration tools.
While the Webmin that nuSphere includes provides an interface to
MySQL, you are also provided with a PHP based MySQL management tool
called PHPMyAdmin. This is one of the best tools around
for easy management of MySQL databases. With clean drop down menus and
convenient data editing, it work great.
After installation it is a simple matter of finding the document
root where you installed (by default
/usr/local/nusphere/apache/htdocs) and start editing files. NuSphere
doesn\’t offer any assistance for the unitiated web developer. It won\’t
teach you how to create web pages, but it will make it easy for you to
manage your own web server.
