I've somewhat inherited a new IBM x3550 server with RHEL 5 installed that will become a Moodle server. I've never used RHEL and am not familiar with subscriptions, RHN, etc. All I know is that I tried to use yum and was told that the system is not registered with RHN. I was wondering if there were any Moodlers out there running their Moodle sites off of RH boxes? I know that I will need to recompile PHP so that it is compiled with xmlrpc support so that I can take advantage of Moodle Networking. What I am uncertain about is how doing such things as compiling with non RedHat packages impacts warranty and other such things. Any words of advise about how to be a Happy Moodler on a RHEL 5 server would be welcome. Oh, and I'm doing remote administration via Putty so everything is command-line only. I'm also not sure about SELinux and experience that folks have that. I realize this is a general post, but I'm just getting my feet wet with RHEL 5 so any and all pointers are welcome. Thanks for any tips, sharing of experience, etc. Peace - Anthony
You can probably re-configure it to look at the fedora repositories instead of the RHN repos. After using Debian/Ubuntu for a while, RH and related distros feel so... clunky. Even though I did get my RHCE a few years ago. If all you've inherited is the HW, I'd Debianise it 
Martín - I am glad to hear that we have similar thoughts. My initial request was to Debian-ise the machine; however, I was told that IBM required either RHEL or SUSE for warranty purposes. There were some questions about how to install Ubuntu with the RAID configuration. Since I was not there, I was limited in what I could provide in terms of support. I'll see what it takes to switch to the fedora repositories. Peace - Anthony
You will need an rhn account if you don't have one, and then you may need to use a product key at their website to give you the 'entitlement'. Once you have that you can register with the command rhn_register and your server will be able to get updates from the rhn channels. This assumes that everything is 'new' and the key has not been used by somebody else with a different rhn login.
I run moodle 1.6 on RHEL 4 -- but have not used RHEL 5 yet. I believe, though I'm not positive, that RHEL 5 comes with php-xmlrpc as a package. So you may want to use yum to search the packages before compiling. I know older versions of RHEL did not have all of the needed php compile options enabled, but I was under the impression that this was fixed now with version 5.
I have in the past disabled SElinux via /etc/sysconfig/selinux but of course the better solution is to make selinux, apache, and your moodle install play nice together. I will be looking at this in more detail soon myself. I don't think it's terribly burdensome to make SElinux behave the way you would need it to. Perhaps setting selinux to 'permissive' mode would help until you managed to get all of the contexts right on the various files... then set SElinux to 'enforcing'.
Good luck
Neil S
I run moodle 1.6 on RHEL 4 -- but have not used RHEL 5 yet. I believe, though I'm not positive, that RHEL 5 comes with php-xmlrpc as a package. So you may want to use yum to search the packages before compiling. I know older versions of RHEL did not have all of the needed php compile options enabled, but I was under the impression that this was fixed now with version 5.
I have in the past disabled SElinux via /etc/sysconfig/selinux but of course the better solution is to make selinux, apache, and your moodle install play nice together. I will be looking at this in more detail soon myself. I don't think it's terribly burdensome to make SElinux behave the way you would need it to. Perhaps setting selinux to 'permissive' mode would help until you managed to get all of the contexts right on the various files... then set SElinux to 'enforcing'.
Good luck
Neil S
Neil - Thanks for the pointers. Hopefully I will be able to get things sorted out with getting the rhn account. The install is a fresh install but I was told that the installation expired at the beginning of the year. All of these hoops are new to me. I will definitely check and see what PHP packages RHEL has. The current install does not have mysql or gd either. If you get SELinux playing nicely with Apache let me know as I would appreciate any notes you might have to help make that happen. Then I will start looking at getting eAccelarator setup. One step at a time but its good to know that there are others out there in a similar environment. Peace - Anthony
Anthony,
Usually the subscription service from Redhat is good for at least one year. If you have a 'product key' from redhat your time starts when that was/is entered in to the RHN site. At least that's the way it's always worked for me. I don't work with IBM, however, so perhaps they do things differently. Also, don't be afraid to call Redhat; especially if everything is new, and the server hasn't been running the subscription for the past year
You might be interested in the Dag rpm repository for things like eAccelerator.
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/php-eaccelerator/ -- note the spec file if you plan to build your own and/or the srpm
They have a lot of packages at Dag and offer a way to add their repositories to yum. My experience is that this can cause dependency issues, so I would avoid doing that if possible. You should use the redhat packages whenever possible.
You might also look at centOS for spec files, srpm packages, or binary compatible RHEL5 rpm's. They have some areas of their repositories where they will compile some packages that are newer than redhat and/or with different options enabled.
I don't know exactly when I'll be looking at SElinux, but hopefully in the next few weeks.
Take care,
Neil
Usually the subscription service from Redhat is good for at least one year. If you have a 'product key' from redhat your time starts when that was/is entered in to the RHN site. At least that's the way it's always worked for me. I don't work with IBM, however, so perhaps they do things differently. Also, don't be afraid to call Redhat; especially if everything is new, and the server hasn't been running the subscription for the past year
You might be interested in the Dag rpm repository for things like eAccelerator.
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/php-eaccelerator/ -- note the spec file if you plan to build your own and/or the srpm
They have a lot of packages at Dag and offer a way to add their repositories to yum. My experience is that this can cause dependency issues, so I would avoid doing that if possible. You should use the redhat packages whenever possible.
You might also look at centOS for spec files, srpm packages, or binary compatible RHEL5 rpm's. They have some areas of their repositories where they will compile some packages that are newer than redhat and/or with different options enabled.
I don't know exactly when I'll be looking at SElinux, but hopefully in the next few weeks.
Take care,
Neil
Congrats on your inherited server!
First: As to SELinux: Just say no. Turn it off. It is not really needed for a web server. It has a steep learning curve with ample frustrations along the way. Unless you are intending to let students loose with login accounts to the server, just turn it off.
Visit the IBM support site and see if there are any platform specific driver/utility RPMs. Install all the drivers that apply to your system.
There are three realy good RPM repositories you can draw from. They are, Jason Litka's Utter Ramblings, RPMForge, and of course CentOS. If you want the bleeding edge PHP/Apache/MySql you can get them from UtterRamblings. If you would prefer possibly more stable versions get them from RPMforge, RedHat, or Centos. UtterRambligs has PHP 5.2.4 . You can download a rpm to to configure the RPMForge repository here. You could also use Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7 repositories. They should work. I don't have any experience with those so I can't reccommend them. If you are not familiar with Centos here is how they describe it on their web site: "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free."
A word of caution, as mentioned in the previous post using other yum repositories with different versions of software can cause some dependency issues. For example, if you intend to use UtterRamblings php-mcrypt you need to load the libmcrypt libs from RPMForge. RedHat does not have this unless you also to subscribe to the Application Server thread. When updating your core applications you might want to disable the other repositories. You could wind up stepping on your previous install.
Check on the status of your RedHat subscriptions. RedHat is very good about geting security patches out. For this alone it is worth the price of a subscription. While we are on the subject of security UtterRamblings provides a mod_security RPM. It's worth reading up on.
You may want to investigate setting up VNC on your server and installing a VNC client on your PC. (see RPMForge - tightVNC) That way you would have full X-windows console access. Short of that you could install Xming on your PC. That will give you X-windows access to all the system configuration utilites. Using Xming I have found the program mysqlcc very useful in setting up Moodle databases.
Have fun!
First: As to SELinux: Just say no. Turn it off. It is not really needed for a web server. It has a steep learning curve with ample frustrations along the way. Unless you are intending to let students loose with login accounts to the server, just turn it off.
Visit the IBM support site and see if there are any platform specific driver/utility RPMs. Install all the drivers that apply to your system.
There are three realy good RPM repositories you can draw from. They are, Jason Litka's Utter Ramblings, RPMForge, and of course CentOS. If you want the bleeding edge PHP/Apache/MySql you can get them from UtterRamblings. If you would prefer possibly more stable versions get them from RPMforge, RedHat, or Centos. UtterRambligs has PHP 5.2.4 . You can download a rpm to to configure the RPMForge repository here. You could also use Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7 repositories. They should work. I don't have any experience with those so I can't reccommend them. If you are not familiar with Centos here is how they describe it on their web site: "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free."
A word of caution, as mentioned in the previous post using other yum repositories with different versions of software can cause some dependency issues. For example, if you intend to use UtterRamblings php-mcrypt you need to load the libmcrypt libs from RPMForge. RedHat does not have this unless you also to subscribe to the Application Server thread. When updating your core applications you might want to disable the other repositories. You could wind up stepping on your previous install.
Check on the status of your RedHat subscriptions. RedHat is very good about geting security patches out. For this alone it is worth the price of a subscription. While we are on the subject of security UtterRamblings provides a mod_security RPM. It's worth reading up on.
You may want to investigate setting up VNC on your server and installing a VNC client on your PC. (see RPMForge - tightVNC) That way you would have full X-windows console access. Short of that you could install Xming on your PC. That will give you X-windows access to all the system configuration utilites. Using Xming I have found the program mysqlcc very useful in setting up Moodle databases.
Have fun!
Hi,
if you still need other RPM repositories, i would recommend EPEL (extra packages for enterprise linux), here you can get packages from the fedora project, which are not (yet) included in to RHEL. There are repos for RHEL 4 and 5 too. From EPEL you can get a few extra php packages, e. g. php-xmlrpc, php-eaccelerator.
One word to CentOS, it is a free of charge version of RHEL, it is 100% binary compatible. It's a RHEL with an other name, last recent version is 5.1.
I'm also experimenting with CentOS, because i want to switch from our gentoo based server to centos. I want it, because hw monitoring on our dell boxes is not supported with gentoo, but with RHEL.
Regards,
Sven
if you still need other RPM repositories, i would recommend EPEL (extra packages for enterprise linux), here you can get packages from the fedora project, which are not (yet) included in to RHEL. There are repos for RHEL 4 and 5 too. From EPEL you can get a few extra php packages, e. g. php-xmlrpc, php-eaccelerator.
One word to CentOS, it is a free of charge version of RHEL, it is 100% binary compatible. It's a RHEL with an other name, last recent version is 5.1.
I'm also experimenting with CentOS, because i want to switch from our gentoo based server to centos. I want it, because hw monitoring on our dell boxes is not supported with gentoo, but with RHEL.
Regards,
Sven
I just wanted to thank Martín, Sven, Neil and Alex for your help with getting the RHEL5 box up and running. I was able to get almost everything configured with your great help. I ended up getting Moodle working with php-xmlrpc, APC, and all. In fact I was even able to get Mahara installed with the extra curl requirements. Once I received the RH Subscription number I was in business; however, there were a couple of things that I needed an alternative repository to get. In any case, thanks to all who lent me a hand in this. I very much appreciate your support. Peace - Anthony