{"id":690,"date":"2010-09-10T14:37:35","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T12:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/?p=690"},"modified":"2010-09-11T09:13:11","modified_gmt":"2010-09-11T07:13:11","slug":"conundrum-ubuntu-desktop-or-server-to-host-an-alt-media-openvideo-opentech-portal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/news\/conundrum-ubuntu-desktop-or-server-to-host-an-alt-media-openvideo-opentech-portal\/","title":{"rendered":"conundrum: Ubuntu Desktop or Server to host an alt-media #openvideo #opentech portal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Friday afternoon conundrum: Ubuntu Desktop<\/strong> or Server<\/strong> to host an alt-media #openvideo #opentech portal on a commercial server?<\/p>\n

An alt-media project expanding within the constraints of very limited funding (which doesn’t provide for a paid sysadmin) aspires to offer a portal for a variety of ‘community’ managed video channels.<\/p>\n

The previous iteration was self-hosted running on Ubuntu Desktop behind a DSL gateway in their office. They’ve since moved to commercial hosting on a non-dedicated server ( http:\/\/www.ovh.co.uk\/products\/rps3<\/a>.xml ). Additionally but perhaps not a deal-breaker, it is envisaged that the project could eventually lead to a roll-your-own distro.<\/p>\n

Their mission commits to open standards, open source, #openvideo, #opentech and thus to use a GUI wherever possible. For this reason they’d prefer to use Ubuntu Desktop to as far as possible limit any divide between geeks and video producers. This would then be administered using Remote Desktop. Any unavoidable use of the command line would be limited to very precisely documented short sessions. The portal is Liferay Community Edition – little known in the UK third sector but used more extensively by grassroots organisations in the US – https:\/\/www.liferay<\/a>.com\/ linking to a MySQL database. As an alt-media project security becomes an issue, some of the content on some of the channels is highly likely to come under attack from hackers. When\/if hacked they envisage a scenario of an easy-ish restoration process of re-installing the OS and necessary MySQL, openJDK, etc and then loading up latest backups of the database and the portal directory (although in truth they really lust after a mirror to switch over to).<\/p>\n

So is this a sensible strategy<\/strong>, or would they be better advised to abandon this degree of openness and go with Ubuntu Server with the administration restricted to yet-to-be-found geeks?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Friday afternoon conundrum: Ubuntu Desktop or Server to host an alt-media #openvideo #opentech portal on a commercial server? An alt-media project expanding within the constraints of very limited funding (which doesn’t provide for a paid sysadmin) aspires to offer a portal for a variety of ‘community’ managed video channels. The previous iteration was self-hosted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[157,18,19,17,155,154,153,156],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-altmedia","tag-foss","tag-nptech","tag-nptechuk","tag-opensource","tag-openstandards","tag-opentech","tag-ubuntu"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commonknowledge.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}