Eskimo North

Okay, so I'm enrolled in the Web Technology certificate program at UW and trying to upgrade my web skills. And it seems everybody nowadays wants their web sites developed using content management systems such as Drupal, Plone, or Ruby on Rails. So I was wondering if Eskimo has any plans to add support for any CMS's.

I have no idea how hard it is to add CMS support. Drupal uses PHP, which I know is already here. ONE/Northwest, which provides tech support to a lot of environmental nonprofits, is promoting Plone.

Any thoughts on this? Any other interest in CMS besides me?

-- Melinda

Courtesy of the State of Washington, I've completed an Interactive Multimedia course with Edmonds Community College. The basic curriculum was pretty limited but they had a lot of tools there and the instructor was willing to let me go way beyond the required material. So I learned JavaScript, PHP, and Flash / ActionScript, and got a much better command of HTML and CSS in the process.

Given that knowledge, I could see all sorts of possibilities for Eskimo, automating a lot of the grunt work, making it so users could customize their environment to a much greater degree, set things up so they could order services and make payments online and have the services automatically provisioned in real time.

But doing so requires a modernized environment with SSL on the main webserver. And I really don't want to have to develop for ancient versions of PHP, etc, and then have to recode everything as we modernize.

Presently, services are mostly implemented on UltraSparc based servers under Aurora Linux. Aurora Linux hasn't been updated in four years and as far as I can tell, the project appears to be dead. And the hardware itself is getting difficult to maintain. It only supports SCSI hard drives and they are almost unobtainable now in the old parallel form.

The stability of Linux on Intel platforms is far superior to Sparc, and SATA drives have adequate performance and are a lot cheaper than SCSI. The maximum amount of RAM supported by the old UltraSparc II architecture was 2GB and the maximum CPU speed 400 Mhz. Essentially, the architecture is obsolete and it's time to move on.

I've been playing with virtual machines on Intel-64 bit hardware using a modern Linux (CentOS 6.2) and I very much like what I can do with it. The fundamental issue that causes reliability issues with the existing platform is the networked file system relationships between machines are unreliable.

It will take some time. There are restrictions placed upon me by the state that limit what I can do presently and even if that weren't an issue, funds are tight and going to an entirely new platform is going to require careful consideration of security issues, and all that has to be worked out.

So that all said; as I move towards this platform I am going to look into content management systems, I am most seriously looking at Ruby on Rails at this point. But that is all not set in stone yet. However, I will be moving towards Apache 2.2.x or 2.4.x (depending if all the necessary modules are available for the latter yet, they weren't the last time I looked). I intend to equip with Java Applets, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and SSL, possibly some other goodies, depending on potential conflicts and security issues. In the school lab, I had everything and the kitchen sink in it, but security wasn't an issue there and I had no net access to research there so I've got to do that now.

My intent is to change the architecture so that the web server is on the machine that has the disk space holding the web pages, the mail server on the machine holding the spool, and then use virtual machines to get the necessary security partitioning rather than physical machines NFS mounting file systems.
This, I hope, will eliminate the NFS hangs that have caused frequent outages over many years. I've been told by the Linux kernel people that each new version of NFS will fix this problem. It's a problem I never had with SunOS which had a reliable NFS implementation, but version 4 of NFS hasn't fixed it so I'm convinced it never will be fixed.

Running virtual machines under a physical machine creates a situation where the physical box only needs a minimum of services operating on it so it has a good chance at being stable and secure, and the virtual hosts can be easily monitored and rebooted remotely.

I know this went a little beyond your initial question but that's what is in the works.

Hi Nanook,

Welcome back. Glad to hear you made some good use of your time "away." I know other Eskimo customers are eager to help out and support the company as you modernize.

You probably can't access the EskimoNorthUsers Yahoo group right now. But that will be a good place to survey customers about what they want and to ask for leads to resources [hardware] that might be cost-effective.

In the mean time, I am looking forward to the upgrades and more web services.

-- Melinda

It could be anywhere from six months to three years before I can go to Yahoo Groups or anything else resembling social networking.
Consequently, I need people to communicate their needs to be either here or via e-mail or phone.

Thank you. It's good to be back.