[conspire] Web apps for a new Linux user (was: Risks of automation)

[Denny Yang]

Hi Rick,

Can't thank you enough for spending the time explaining those applications
to me.

So it sounds to me that most of them, if not all of them, are Web apps?

Would you agree that as an admin, maybe I should try to get familiar with
one of those
Open Source Server and Network Monitoring tools, such as Icinga2, Nagios
Core, or
Centreon (just to name a few). And put those Web apps in the back of the
head for now?

By the way, do you use any of those network monitoring app?

Have a great weekend,
Denny




On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 11:46 PM Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Denny Yang (yangcdenny at gmail.com):
>
> > Hi Rick
> >
> > Hope you have been doing well.
>
> Ca va!
>
> > Can you please tell me which one, or two of these open source
> > application(s) is / are suitable for Linux newbie?
> >
> > If I don't ended up using it, I know at Least how to install it.
>
> A few of those I actually don't know at all, and most of them I know
> only from light readings or being a user.
>
> Of the ones I know something about, exactly one of them is deliberately
> simple to set up and operate:  DokuWiki.  This is one of two popular
> wiki packages that do NOT require a back-end database as the datastore.
> The other one (a piece of software I actually prefer) is MoinMoin, which
> requires little more than just Python -- the language in which it's
> written.
>
> DocuWiki, by contrast, is written in PHP5.  For quite a number of
> reasons, I personally would go rather far out of my way to avoid PHP
> applications -- a long discussion I don't want to recap at the moment.
>
> So, if you are just seeking a bit of experience running a public-facing
> Web application, I'd frankly say try MoinMoin -- beyind either
> Lighthttpd or nginx as the HTTP daemon.  For public-facing access, you
> will also need (for all practical purposes[1] a static IP address and a
> DNS identity for the IP.
>
> Actually, as a last minute alternative, I notice you also listed
> Etherpad Lite, which is an equally uncomplicated Web app, requiring only
> node.js / server-side Javascript.  So, maybe you'd prefer to run that.
>
> Several of the Web apps you listed, such as Joomla, Drupal, Moodle,
> GitLab, osTicket, ownCloud, and WordPress, are quite complicated, which
> I would certainly avoid as a new Web admin.  Also, many are in PHP.
>
> On the matter of 'knowing how to install it', IMO it's important to use
> _only_ packaged software from your Linux distro unless you absolutely
> cannot avoid doing so.  It is a very common new-user error to rush to
> the 'upstream' provider of software, particularly Web apps, rather than
> using the distribution's packaging of that software.  I cautioned about
> some of the disadvantages of making that error in this editorial
> footnote, quite a few years ago:
> http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/weatherwax.html#1
>
>
>
> [1] Technically, for this limited purpose, you could get by with a
> dynamic IP reachable on its public-facing port 80, the HTTP port, plus
> DynamicDNS, but it's certainly a lot less trouble just having a static
> IP address, plus that would become mandatory for some additional uses
> you might wish to expand into later, such as running a public SMTP
> e-mail daemon.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> conspire mailing list
> conspire at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20180817/fa4f3877/attachment.html>