[Rack] so... what is pony for?

[Jonathan Lassoff]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Patrick Keys <citizenkeys at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was thinking of just setting up some web-based projects to play around
> with and also a sort of "Noisebridge labs" of web-based things that
> Noisebridge might could use, like the diaspora node, phpbb, etc.

Sounds like fun!

> I'm considering just getting a computer myself, setting it up with the LAMP
> stack, putting it in the server room, and leaving it at that. Then everybody
> could use it for web-based projects. But I see the issue with people
> worrying about breaking somebody else's project.  Something I haven't really
> setup before is a virtual machine server like Xen (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen ).  I'm going to research that some more.

I would recommend against placing another server in there. It's
already a huge electricity sink as it is, and pony and stallion are
mostly sitting idle. Please use pony -- it's there to be used.

It's kinda a pain in the butt to setup Xen since it'll necessitate
switching out the kernel that's in there, but one quick solution might
be to try out qemu backed with kqemu. It's a quick way to experiment
with throw-away VMs so that you can get your installation working how
you like it.

Get some chef recipes for installing what you want, and your project
will become more portable and you can just drop it onto whatever
machine is convenient for you at the time.
This way, you can experiment with all this stuff on pony, have a few
users experiment and if it gets popular, you can easily drop it on an
EC2 instance or something so that it's usable over the WAN as well.

Cheers,
jof