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Good news, Mr. AC: There are people who are doing lots of work to enable just that sort of configuration:
https://github.com/Kickball/aw...
https://turnkeylinux.org/
https://bitnami.com/

With respect to the 'business class tax', it's obnoxious to pay twice the price for internet...but business customers get better support and the option for an SLA, as well as static IP addresses. Now, I wouldn't be opposed to an 'enthusiast' tier with consumer-grade support and open ports 80/25 on a single static IP, but it's not a thing for the moment...which is why no-IP's port 80 redirect is helpful. Similarly, very few ISPs block 443, so https + reverse proxy = green pastures of self-hosting on a residential line.

"Everyone hosting a mail server" is a bad idea. Most don't know how to configure or administer one, nor have the desire to do so. The problem with e-mail as a bastion of free speech is that it requires the recipient to listen, a premise compromised at the outset. Meanwhile, the majority of e-mail sent and received today is spam, so increasing the avenues for spam just sounds like a horried idea all around. As a final point, the gatekeepers move from "who moderates Facebook" to "who decides what is and isn't spam at Spamhaus".

We need middlemen for certain things. Making technical competency a de facto requirement for exercising freedom of speech is itself an example of censoring in practice. I hate the cloud as much as you do, but there are certain people who will always need a tech person in order for their idea to be heard. There's no reason they should be required to get a server, install a LAMP stack and CMS, register a domain and configure its DNS, leave their computer on all the time, and be comfortable in tweaking a few lines in Javascript, just to interact with others about knitting.

Is this what you need?
https://owncloud.org/
https://doc.owncloud.org/serve...

Get up and running in a few clicks.
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/o...

Maybe something like Tracks

or any of the other pre-packaged issue trackers from turnkeylinux.org

It's as close to out-of-the-box as I've found.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/la...

And this one too
http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora...

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/la...

You mean I can run a server out of my home?! That's amazing!

How is this easier than spinning up a TurnkeyLinux appliance on an old Pentium 4 (or better) desktop you can get for free in almost any part of the country?

Let's see - I need to buy the RaspberryPi, a case, and a power brick at a (practical) minimum, which puts the system in the $75+ range - compared to a repurposed desktop that will cost around $0. Of course, the difference is in the monthly power bill - the old Pentium 4 desktop will use much more power. You could avoid that expense by running your appliances under, say, VirtualBox if you normally keep your desktop on 24x7....

Oh yeah, the TOS of most ISPs would preclude any server type work on a residential account, at least that is the case here in the US.

I always like to use TurnKey Core for such things http://www.turnkeylinux.org/core

It's small, lightweight and runs very quickly even on older hardware. It does a great job.


-americamatrix

And this might be a great way to "try out" Vanilla Forums - Turnkey Linux Vanilla Forums appliance...

Wind up a VM, give it a shot, and see if it works for you.

There are similar VMs for punBB, phpBB, SimpleMachines and other messaging forums

And this might be a great way to "try out" Vanilla Forums - Turnkey Linux Vanilla Forums appliance...

Wind up a VM, give it a shot, and see if it works for you.

There are similar VMs for punBB, phpBB, SimpleMachines and other messaging forums

And this might be a great way to "try out" Vanilla Forums - Turnkey Linux Vanilla Forums appliance...

Wind up a VM, give it a shot, and see if it works for you.

There are similar VMs for punBB, phpBB, SimpleMachines and other messaging forums

And this might be a great way to "try out" Vanilla Forums - Turnkey Linux Vanilla Forums appliance...

Wind up a VM, give it a shot, and see if it works for you.

There are similar VMs for punBB, phpBB, SimpleMachines and other messaging forums

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab Give this to your server team and let them run it under virtualization.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/redmine Seriously. I had an issue tracker running in 5 minutes. By 15 minutes I had the settings the way I wanted it. They ship you a virtual machine image. You load it into VirtualBox and click start. The VM loads to a little screen that tells you what IP address the redmine is running at. It also has git i installed, and it was super quick to migrate my git repo into it. Since I use redmine with git, it's really handy because they are already integrated - when I put "refs #32" in my git commit message, it appears on ticket #32.

For public free software projects, there are plenty of cloud based VCS and issue tracker; google code, github, indefero and bitbucket come to mind.

Otherwise, for private projects you may wish to have a look at the turnkey linux images for project tracking
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/project-management

I see they have redmine and trac images. It hardly gets easier to set up than an turnkey vm image!

Turnkey Linux: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ I know roughly nothing about linux and have used this to set up a few servers. It's based on ubuntu server and has a nice web-based management interface.

I'd suggest that you go with one of the mainstream/common Linux server distros: either RHEL (for which you can use CentOS, which is essentially the same, minus the RedHat-copyrighted bits) or Ubuntu Server.

Either of these can be configured to use a GUI. I'd actually pick RHEL/CentOS over Ubuntu, and during the install (which is graphical), you can select to install a web+database server along with a Desktop (GUI). The installation is fairly straightforward; the most complex part is arguably the partitioning, although you can use the guided partitioner to just use all free space on the disk. Partitioning isn't something that's linux-centric, although the partition scheme for Linux is perhaps a bit more complex than what'd you would expect coming from a Windows world (dedicated swap device, LVM to virtualize the partitions, etc..). If you use the guided "do it for me" option, you can avoid getting your hands wet with this complexity.

The primary reason I'd suggest going mainstream is that the support will be there. If you choose some OS that no one really uses, you'll be hard-pressed to find distro-centric documentation for it. If you go with Ubuntu or RedHat, you can use Google to get through any obstacles you may find. There are plenty of tutorials available when you google for a simple [do this task] on [this distribution]. For example:

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=install+phpbb+on+rhel
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=install+phpbb+on+ubuntu+server

While you could probably use this documentation to complete a task on another distro, it's helpful to have a tutorial for the specific OS you're using; all the commands will be the same, and any dependency problems, etc... will all be accounted for.

Additionally, should you decide that you want to learn more and play around, having something mainstream installed means that your learning experience will be directly relevant to anything you want to do down the line.

As an alternative, you could go with a pre-built phpBB appliance. http://www.turnkeylinux.org/phpbb is a single ISO or VDK that is built on Ubuntu Server and comes pre-configured with phpBB (they have many other applications available as well - highly recommended!). It'll ask you a few questions during the install, and once complete, you'll boot up into a fully-functional Linux server with phpBB already running.

Turnkey Linux has a very nice implementation of this here

Grab yourself a Zimbra appliance from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/email - up and running in a few minutes, and it should give you most of what you'd expect coming from Gmail.

Cant be more than $10,000? I have single switches worth 6x that.

When I said $10,000 that was clearly tongue in cheek. As in the PHB saying, "Do whatever it takes to get this up and running! Hear me? Whatever it takes. As long as you can do it for free."

You'd be surprised how often some people actually get this as a demand from their boss, myself included. It's amazing how one can build an entire infrastructure for free nowadays with open-source solutions like Zimbra*, Resara*, and Bacula*, along with a few little TurnKey appliances here or there. The only real cost is hardware which, thankfully, is getting cheaper all the time...

* why do all of these things end with "uh"?

Drakconf did this too, I think, it's been a long time since I've last used PCLOS2007. Very nice, though not as pretty and informative as I'd like. Though I'd give the Electra initiative priority, to get some traction on the turn-key appliance front, because virtualization is not always a good fit, OTOH, integration of configuration management with the package manager would be priceless. Imagine typing sudo apt-get install lamp-stack and having a web sever ready to be loaded? Or say sudo apt-get install lamp-stack-joomla and having CMS set up and ready to go?
And, yes I know about these http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ guys - as I said, virtualization is not always a fit.

Yo

I've got like two production sites running Joomla! and I can tell you it's not for the novice. Luckily Turnkey Linux created a self contained ISOs for something like this making it a breeze to manage and install. Thank goodness for webmin!

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

Give Turnkey Linux a try. They have several live or install CD packages for a particular need.

They have stuff like ready to go out of the box of Joomla, MySQL, LAMP and so on. Pretty slick stuff. It taught me some of the neatest tools to use and I later built a server from a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 and installed the tools manually. Best thing there is for people who wanted to build a server and not sure where to go about doing it.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

I know a little bit about this because I am one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project which builds small installable live CDs (we're up to 9) optimized for various mostly server-related tasks. I've been investigating supporting live USB mode.

Your generic run-of-the-mill USB drive has about fourth-half the read/write performance of your hard drive nowadays (10-15MB/s). Since there are no moving parts (spinning platters), usually the seek times are very good.

There are several things you can do to optimize the performance of an operating system running live from a USB drive:

1) buy a faster USB drive: a good USB drive (e.g., Lexar JumpDrive) can have 2-3 times the performance of a generic.

2) Use a Linux distribution with a smaller footprint such as DSL (50MB) or Puppy Linux (standard edition is 68MB): the smaller the footprint, the less your drive has to read, the faster your system will load.

3) Try loading the operating system system into a ramdisk: many live USB distributions have the ability to load themselves into RAM. With some you have to add a cheatcode in the bootloader. Others do it by default if there is enough memory (usually not a problem with small distributions and modern computers).

4) Try turning on readahead: many distributions which are designed to run from a live CD or live USB have a feature that reads ahead various files important to the boot sequence sequentially. Whether or not this helps depends on the characteristics of the storage medium you are using, but you should investigate it.

For anyone who would like a ready-to-use MySQL server to experiment with while reading the book, I'd like to recommend TurnKey MySQL. (disclaimer: I'm one of the developers)

It's an easy-to-use, lightweight, installable live CD of the MySQL database that can run on real hardware in addition to most types of virtual machines. It features a Mac OS X-themed Web management interface and a Python configuration and installation console. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy LTS, and is designed to provide users with a pre-integrated, automatically updated, turn-key operating system environment that is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to run the MySQL database with maximum usability, efficiency, and security.

It's part of the TurnKey Linux opensource project.

For anyone who would like a ready-to-use MySQL server to experiment with while reading the book, I'd like to recommend TurnKey MySQL. (disclaimer: I'm one of the developers)

It's an easy-to-use, lightweight, installable live CD of the MySQL database that can run on real hardware in addition to most types of virtual machines. It features a Mac OS X-themed Web management interface and a Python configuration and installation console. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy LTS, and is designed to provide users with a pre-integrated, automatically updated, turn-key operating system environment that is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to run the MySQL database with maximum usability, efficiency, and security.

It's part of the TurnKey Linux opensource project.

Despite being free on one level, if you look at opensource from a business perspective you realize they are looking at the costs slightly differently.

If they are looking at all that is. To be considered by a business, the opensource alternative has to be noticed first, and that isn't trivial considering the vast majority of opensource projects don't exactly have a marketing budget.

One way to lower the barrier to entry is to make an opensource solution really easy to try out, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Often an opensource alternative is noticed, but its not a perfect fit for what the business (thinks it) needs. The free part is less impressive when you have to consider customization costs, integration costs, long-term maintenance costs, etc. Most businesses don't want to have to notice their software, they just want something that works.

Now for the plug. I'm one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. The project's motto is "everything that can be easy, should be easy!"

We've been building a family of installable live CDs that are based on Ubuntu (Debian too soon!) and are each pre-integrated to serve specific usage scenarios (e.g., CMS, database, Wiki, web development frameworks).

We only launched a few months ago, and we're still officially in beta, but thanks to the feedback from the community we've already made pretty good progress (up to 9 appliances now - we're covering the low hanging fruit first)

Technical highlights:

• auto-updated daily with latest security patches
• MacOS X themed web management interface
• easy to use configuration console (written from scratch in Python)
• packaged as an installable Live CD that runs on real machines and VMs
• minimal footprint - includes only minimum required components (about 150MB per appliance)
• based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy LTS

We're hoping this kind of last-mile integration effort will make opensource alternatives an easier "sell" and promote adoption.

Check us out!

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

Despite being free on one level, if you look at opensource from a business perspective you realize they are looking at the costs slightly differently.

If they are looking at all that is. To be considered by a business, the opensource alternative has to be noticed first, and that isn't trivial considering the vast majority of opensource projects don't exactly have a marketing budget.

One way to lower the barrier to entry is to make an opensource solution really easy to try out, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Often an opensource alternative is noticed, but its not a perfect fit for what the business (thinks it) needs. The free part is less impressive when you have to consider customization costs, integration costs, long-term maintenance costs, etc. Most businesses don't want to have to notice their software, they just want something that works.

Now for the plug. I'm one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. The project's motto is "everything that can be easy, should be easy!"

We've been building a family of installable live CDs that are based on Ubuntu (Debian too soon!) and are each pre-integrated to serve specific usage scenarios (e.g., CMS, database, Wiki, web development frameworks).

We only launched a few months ago, and we're still officially in beta, but thanks to the feedback from the community we've already made pretty good progress (up to 9 appliances now - we're covering the low hanging fruit first)

Technical highlights:

• auto-updated daily with latest security patches
• MacOS X themed web management interface
• easy to use configuration console (written from scratch in Python)
• packaged as an installable Live CD that runs on real machines and VMs
• minimal footprint - includes only minimum required components (about 150MB per appliance)
• based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy LTS

We're hoping this kind of last-mile integration effort will make opensource alternatives an easier "sell" and promote adoption.

Check us out!

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/