On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Brian Wolf <[email protected]> wrote:
> We've just taken on a few clients who each have requirements that
> LedgerSMB can satisfy. At least one client needs enhancements or
> modifications to workflow / screens; some changes are specific to the
> client and others apply more broadly to other clients.
>
> I'm new to LedgerSMB and by no means have expertise in PostgreSQL
> administration. I imagine that multiple clients can be hosted on one
> server, but I don't have a clear picture how that would be set up. Can
> someone provide a step-by-step outline?
>
>
As I understand it from talking to you, you are looking at hosting
LedgerSMB for multiple businesses. There are a few gotchas to get into
here and so my recommendation generally is that unless there is a common
accounting team between two businesses, these should be deployed with both
multiple instances of LedgerSMB and multiple instances of PostgreSQL.
These can of course share servers however the load allows you to do (but I
would recommend eventually a decent physical server for PostgreSQL with
good I/O bandwidth if you get enough users to make that worthwhile).
One key design consideration you will have to think about is that we use
PostgreSQL roles for user accounts and these are global to a PostgreSQL
instance. So if there is a common accounting team behind two companies,
you can just use two db's and share user accounts. On the other hand, if
there are multiple companies this becomes difficult.
I am assuming you want to let your customers create user accounts etc. If
you don't and if you want to manage permissions for the user, then you will
have some light customization to do. That's beyond the scope of this
recommendation.
Spinning up additional PostgreSQL instances is pretty cheap processor-wise.
These don't take a lot of memory for the process that just listens on the
socket, and your memory issues are primary those about usage. In general
you should have enough memory on your PostgreSQL server that all user data
across all companies fits comfortably in memory, though.
The first thing to look at doing is creating a new PostgreSQL instance. To
do this, basically you (using Red Hat paths here):
sudo -u postgres initdb -D /var/lib/pgsql/data-acme
Where acme is the customer's name.
Then edit the /var/lib/pgsql/data-acme/postgresql.conf to listen on a
different port (let's say 5433 for the second customer, and increasing one
each time). And you probably want to copy the pg_hba.conf from a stock
version (adding the IP of your web server and allowing it to authenticate
via md5). You may want to open up additional addresses for the customer at
their request, and you can do this if you like.
Then you have to edit the startup scripts. This is becoming more
distro-dependent. But you need to make sure PostgreSQL is also started
against the new data directory. If it is CentOS 5.x or similar, the
/etc/init.d/postgresql is the file to edit. If that file is not listed,
see if there is a /usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service and if so
read the comments and create a new file as per the specifications there.
That's all that is required for PostgreSQL.
On the LedgerSMB side, just copy the LedgerSMB directory to a new one
(maybe lsmb-demo to lsmb-acme) and alter the ledgersmb.conf to point at the
new port number. Then you need to re-generate a new configuration for this
service. You could do this by running sed on the existing configuration
file (in /etc/httpd/conf.d on Red Hat-like systems) to change one directory
to another, and outputting that to a new file. Then service httpd restart
will restart Apache with the new directory active.
Then go to http://myhost/lsmb-acme/setup.pl or whatever the alias is, and
create the database.
Hope this helps.
Chris Travers
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Live Security Virtual Conference
Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and
threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions
will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware
threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/
_______________________________________________
Ledger-smb-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-users
