Running an isolated "virtual" test webserver

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seppelrockt · Post by **seppelrockt** » Mon May 08, 2006 10:45 am

My idea is to create a homepage with drupal. I am pretty new to the whole thing (and have a slow/expensive internet connection) so I prefer to create a local "testing environment" with just the minimum of apps that are needed for drupal. I don't want to install drupal and all the server stuff on my regular Gentoo Desktop install (Notebook). The server install should be somehow isolated. Now I wonder how I can do this the best way. I have plenty of free space in /home. What would you recommend? VMWARE? usermode-linux? vserver? I am looking for a solution that can be easily set up on gentoo (and easily deleted if not needed anymore) and is not to space consuming. The test setup will only be used locally, so performance is not really important. I would apprecheate any pointers and comments. Thanks in advance!

pem · Post by **pem** » Mon May 08, 2006 11:07 am

drupal is based on php and mysql. On my website, I've created a little howto to taylor an installation for developping locally a web site. Maybe that will lead you on the right track...

seppelrockt · Post by **seppelrockt** » Wed May 17, 2006 11:07 am

Thanks for your answer but my strongest concern is that I have my Gentoo Desktop install and the server clearly seperated - I guess I will do this by using VMWARE or UML.

Now my question turns more into "how can I perform a Gentoo install optimized for server usage?" I didn't find docs about that topic for the server N00bs like me

The idea is to get a very minimal install and do not trap into all this pitfalls that are for sure involved in the topic.

lxg · Post by **lxg** » Wed May 17, 2006 4:41 pm

Maybe you'd like to try XAMPP for Linux, which installs completely independent from the base system into the /opt directory. There is no big gain of security, but it is much more convenient.

However, I have to admit I didn't try XAMPP for Linux (never needed to). But the Windows versions are just great and are doing fine jobs on some of my customers' servers.

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Or, try ServerSite Linux, a web server on a Live CD, where you can include own contents (Apache and MySQL) from a USB stick.

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Janne Pikkarainen · Post by **Janne Pikkarainen** » Wed May 17, 2006 5:33 pm

Personally I don't like User-Mode Linux a lot: it can be good nowadays, but it seemed very unstable when I last tried it in 2002-2003 with Red Hat 8.0.

I'm using vserver in my test box for those test-and-then-throw-away temporarily servers. But that requires vserver-patched kernel sources (vserver-sources in portage); if you can live with that when using your desktop box, then vserver is not too bad.

Also qemu is pretty easy to setup and doesn't require any kernel modifications, although it becames a lot faster with kqemu kernel module.

VMware Server (nowadays free) is a really fast, feature-packed and slick, but on the other hand a bit resource heavy solution and really thanks you if it gets a lot of memory.