{"id":403,"date":"2011-08-02T22:41:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T05:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10kdev.ivystreetinc.com\/?p=403"},"modified":"2011-08-02T22:52:59","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T05:52:59","slug":"enterprise-hosting-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=403","title":{"rendered":"Enterprise Hosting At Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK that title is a not<\/em> serious.<\/p>\n

At my current gig we need servers; and I’ve been waiting for the bosses to make the deals to get some real server services.\u00a0 It’s finally happening, but, its real slow — the handshakes, board room stuff all that.\u00a0 I didn’t want to strap myself to a kluge solution, but since I see the light at the end of the tunnel I went ahead and pulled a solution out.<\/p>\n

Here’s the need:\u00a0 we need a QA server to allow the product owners\/business to look at and test the websites we are developing before we deploy them.\u00a0 Our current solution involves a week on a staging server before production and we do not control the deployments or data or anything.<\/p>\n

Our sites are Java\/Spring\/Hibernate running on Tomcat with Afresco\/MySQL.\u00a0 Services for Java can be pretty expensive and time consuming to set up correctly, and I wasn’t about to pay for it myself.<\/p>\n

First Solution spike: <\/strong><\/em> Amazon EC2.\u00a0 It seems like a good solution but the business wouldn’t give me a credit card and some of the “free tier” services run out after a year — and then they start charging.\u00a0 Plus the 10 gig limit is of no use to us for storage we have a ton of data and media. (Honestly, its expensive to do this for real we spiked our needs and were quite surprised.)<\/p>\n

Second Solution spike:<\/strong><\/em> Google App Engine.\u00a0 Nope — waaaaay to limited, good for proof of concept\/RAD apps and that’s it (or Python).<\/p>\n

Third Solution spike:<\/strong><\/em> VMWare.\u00a0 Easy enough to set up an image but, would have to have business users install VMware and then obtain my 1 gig+ images.\u00a0\u00a0 Too complicated.<\/p>\n

Fourth Solution spike: <\/strong><\/em> Portable Linux.\u00a0 In the old days you could run a version of Linux in Windows — Damn Small Linux still does this.\u00a0\u00a0 But them as you know, you descend into distro hell trying to get everything configured on some weird Linux deployment.\u00a0 Finally I tried QEMU with and Ubuntu iso — is worked but was sooooooooooo heavy and slow, and again the file izes were massive over a gig easy.<\/p>\n

The Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went home and saw a dusty old server tower sitting in the corner and decided that was it — serve it up from home.\u00a0 I used to do this in the old days with another domain I have, before it became cost effective to have PHP sites hosted (like WordPress).\u00a0 I used Zone Edit, which maps a static ip\/domain name to the\u00a0 dynamic IP you get from your DSL service provider (or whomever) and had a little daemon software you install on your local home machine (that has no static IP) that syncs the IP addresses should the service change it.<\/p>\n

Setup:<\/p>\n