Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

So during my migration of old server to new stuff, I decided to experiment with using OS X as a server environment. With Apple Remote Desktop, it wasn't half bad really (although ARD is really crappy, speed-wise, compared to Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection, thanks to its VNC roots).

It took a while, especially since I was unfamiliar with a lot of the OSS-on-OSX subculture in the Intertron, but in time I had everything set up including Fink, a LAMP stack, and such, but weirdness remained. For example, I kept fighting mysqld and its tendency to decide to not startup on boot, no doubt my own lack of knowledge of some particular OS X magic rather than an inherent lack of the feature by the OS or Mysql.

Anyway, so I was talking to Russ the other day and he very reasonably said that I was nuts for not using simply Debian or something of the sort, and last night I decided to give it a try. I was very impressed. In about 45 minutes I had Edgy server installed, with a full LAMP stack, Mysql properly configured and everything migrated. I shutdown, reconnected everything to replace the Mac, and I was done!

There is some sluggishness when posting right now, probably as a result of the crappy disk or perhaps not enough memory (although the machine seems perfectly happy), or maybe it's the fact that I'm using LVM. I will try a switcheroo to Feisty (which came out today) at some point next week when I have another hour to spend on this and perhaps I'll also try out a couple of different options. :)

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on April 19 2007 at 4:10 PM