Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Jordan Michaels]

You can customize the location of the WEB-INF directory for each context 
(site):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/railo/AEQGOlv4m0I

This becomes particularly important when multiple contexts use a single 
code base (when clustering, some CMS's, etc).

Just FYI.

Warm Regards,
Jordan Michaels

On 05/28/2014 11:13 PM, Jaime Metcher wrote:
> but if you take the path of least
> resistance (use mod_cfml and make the Apache document root the same as the
> Tomcat context root) then at the very least you end up with a dirty big
> WEB-INF folder in your document root.

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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Jochem van Dieten]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Pete Freitag wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K wrote:
>
> Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?
>
> Yes, if you pick an obscure distribution intended for hardcore linux users
> (for example Gentoo linux) you will have a hard time as a newbie. Pick one
> that is commonly used such as Redhat Enterprise Linux / CentOS or Ubuntu.
>

I think the most important consideration for a new user is whether the
software you want to install is available as a package or needs to be
installed from source. If everything you want is a package, you can expect
the different applications to integrate together quite easily and you can
expect security updates to become available automatically.

For us that typically means we install Apache, Tomcat7 and PostgreSQL from
packages. This automatically installs dependencies such as Java and the
modules to connect Apache to Tomcat. Then we add a configuration to forward
requests for .cfm files from Apache to Tomcat and deploy a Railo WAR on
Tomcat. From then on, the platform is easily updated from the package
manager. We never use the official Railo installer: it may be easier for
the initial installation, but being able to install security updates for
all installed application with just one command is more important in the
long run.

Jochem

-- 
Jochem van Dieten
http://jochem.vandieten.net/


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RE: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Mark A Kruger]

We use CentOS extensively here at CFWT and have many customers using it as
well. Very solid. 

-Original Message-
From: Gerald Guido [mailto:gerald.gu...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2014 10:29 AM
To: cf-talk
Subject: Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan
please ...


>
>
> I like RHEL/CentOS because they are pretty stable and they don't do
> bleeding
> edge, main bug/security fixes, you have to upgrade to the next major
> release to upgrade major versions of many packages.


Yeah what Pete said,

I have been on Centos and RedHat for years. It is very stable but the
package manager seems to be a few versions behind the latest release of
software packages. This is mostly for security and stability reasons, i.e.
they err on the side of caution. Which is fine and dandy with me.

There are a multitude of hosting CF's out there what will automate a lot
of, if not most, admin chores. But the downside of these are of course
security concerns. The most infamous of which is Kloxo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kloxo#Security_issues

So caveat emptor and do your research first.

G!

*Gerald Anthony Guido*
Nullius in verba <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba>
-- Horace

Twitter <https://twitter.com/CozmoTrouble>
Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/gerald.guido.9>


On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pete Freitag  wrote:

>
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K  wrote:
>
> > Are there any other 'gotchas' moving from windows to linux?
> >
>
> I did a presentation on Linux for CF users at cf.Objective() this year, my
> slides are here: http://slides.com/petefreitag/cf-on-linux#/
>
> Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?
> >
>
> Yes, if you pick an obscure distribution intended for hardcore linux users
> (for example Gentoo linux) you will have a hard time as a newbie. Pick one
> that is commonly used such as Redhat Enterprise Linux / CentOS or Ubuntu.
I
> like RHEL/CentOS because they are pretty stable and they don't do bleeding
> edge, main bug/security fixes, you have to upgrade to the next major
> release to upgrade major versions of many packages. This has downsides
too,
> for example RHEL/CentOS 6.x will only support Apache 2.2.x if you want
> Apache 2.4 you have to install it manually or wait for RHEL7.
>
> --
> Pete Freitag - Adobe Community Professional
> http://foundeo.com/ - ColdFusion Consulting & Products
> http://hackmycf.com - Is your ColdFusion Server Secure?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubESB87vl5U - FuseGuard your CFML in 10
> minutes
>
>
> 



~|
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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Gerald Guido]

>
>
> I like RHEL/CentOS because they are pretty stable and they don't do
> bleeding
> edge, main bug/security fixes, you have to upgrade to the next major
> release to upgrade major versions of many packages.


Yeah what Pete said,

I have been on Centos and RedHat for years. It is very stable but the
package manager seems to be a few versions behind the latest release of
software packages. This is mostly for security and stability reasons, i.e.
they err on the side of caution. Which is fine and dandy with me.

There are a multitude of hosting CF's out there what will automate a lot
of, if not most, admin chores. But the downside of these are of course
security concerns. The most infamous of which is Kloxo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kloxo#Security_issues

So caveat emptor and do your research first.

G!

*Gerald Anthony Guido*
Nullius in verba 
-- Horace

Twitter 
Facebook 


On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pete Freitag  wrote:

>
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K  wrote:
>
> > Are there any other 'gotchas' moving from windows to linux?
> >
>
> I did a presentation on Linux for CF users at cf.Objective() this year, my
> slides are here: http://slides.com/petefreitag/cf-on-linux#/
>
> Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?
> >
>
> Yes, if you pick an obscure distribution intended for hardcore linux users
> (for example Gentoo linux) you will have a hard time as a newbie. Pick one
> that is commonly used such as Redhat Enterprise Linux / CentOS or Ubuntu. I
> like RHEL/CentOS because they are pretty stable and they don't do bleeding
> edge, main bug/security fixes, you have to upgrade to the next major
> release to upgrade major versions of many packages. This has downsides too,
> for example RHEL/CentOS 6.x will only support Apache 2.2.x if you want
> Apache 2.4 you have to install it manually or wait for RHEL7.
>
> --
> Pete Freitag - Adobe Community Professional
> http://foundeo.com/ - ColdFusion Consulting & Products
> http://hackmycf.com - Is your ColdFusion Server Secure?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubESB87vl5U - FuseGuard your CFML in 10
> minutes
>
>
> 

~|
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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Pete Freitag]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K  wrote:

> Are there any other 'gotchas' moving from windows to linux?
>

I did a presentation on Linux for CF users at cf.Objective() this year, my
slides are here: http://slides.com/petefreitag/cf-on-linux#/

Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?
>

Yes, if you pick an obscure distribution intended for hardcore linux users
(for example Gentoo linux) you will have a hard time as a newbie. Pick one
that is commonly used such as Redhat Enterprise Linux / CentOS or Ubuntu. I
like RHEL/CentOS because they are pretty stable and they don't do bleeding
edge, main bug/security fixes, you have to upgrade to the next major
release to upgrade major versions of many packages. This has downsides too,
for example RHEL/CentOS 6.x will only support Apache 2.2.x if you want
Apache 2.4 you have to install it manually or wait for RHEL7.

--
Pete Freitag - Adobe Community Professional
http://foundeo.com/ - ColdFusion Consulting & Products
http://hackmycf.com - Is your ColdFusion Server Secure?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubESB87vl5U - FuseGuard your CFML in 10
minutes


~|
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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Russ Michaels]

Thanks for the details.
Have you considered dping a blog post detailing the process

Russ Michaels
www.michaels.me.uk
cfmldeveloper.com
cflive.net
cfsearch.com
On 29 May 2014 07:13, "Jaime Metcher"  wrote:

>
> Coming in a couple of months late here, but I've just been through a move
> from Windows/Adobe CF/MS SQL Server to Linux/Railo/MySQL and found a couple
> of things not previously mentioned.
>
> Windows -> Linux: already covered above, but I'll just add that anything
> that turns into a file name (like CFC paths)  is also included in the
> case-sensitivity issue.  One issue that hit me was case inconsistency in
> strings stored in the database that were later used to build path names.
>
> AdobeCF -> Railo: Even aside from the unsupported tags, syntax
> compatibility although very good is not 100%.  See e.g.
> http://lagod.id.au/blog/?p=378.  A lot of this will come down to coding
> style - your code might be completely fine.  The big thing for me though is
> the way Apache and Tomcat work together.   ACF goes to some lengths to
> disappear the Tomcat layer and make the whole thing look like a web server
> that miraculously knows what to do with cfm files.  Railo is much more of a
> classic Tomcat app, in that it is definitely sitting behind the web server
> with its own separate configuration.  I can go into more detail about the
> consequences of that if you like, but if you take the path of least
> resistance (use mod_cfml and make the Apache document root the same as the
> Tomcat context root) then at the very least you end up with a dirty big
> WEB-INF folder in your document root.
>
> MSSQL -> MySQL:  CRUD queries will almost certainly be fine.  Heavy-weight
> slicing and dicing queries probably won't.  There are lots of differences
> in DDL (I have a very home-brewed set of regexes that did the trick for me
> - happy to share).  Stored procedures will need to be completely
> rewritten.  Many functions are different, but most have direct
> equivalents.  One gotcha is that when MySQL is running on Linux, database
> object names (e.g. table names) are case sensitive.
>
> That sounds like a lot, but it is perfectly feasible to have one codebase
> that will deploy and run happily in both environments (that might not be a
> requirement for you, but it does illustrate that the differences are not
> major).  My total changeover time was about six weeks, but I was completely
> reworking my build and provisioning procedures at the same time.
>
> Feel free to ping me on or off list if you want any more detail on any of
> this.
>
> Jaime
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Mike K  wrote:
>
> >
> > Thank you everybody, I'm glad I asked.I have changed my plan now.
> >  Cameron and others  made a  good point.   I was trying to do too many
> > thing at once. My plan now is to get a new hosting environment as
> > similar as possible to my current one, so its gives me the most chance
> that
> > I'll be able to just copy everything over and most of it will work as is.
> >  Then work from there on the transition to Linux or the cloud and Railo
> in
> > two more steps.
> >
> > Thanks to a suggestion from another member of this list off-list I'm not
> > going with the cloud just yet,  I'll go with a VPS at Viviotech and work
> > from there.   So far every question I've asked they have said "yes we can
> > do that all you do is    "
> >
> > Once again this group helps me out.  In this case, I can see if I had
> gone
> > with my original plan,  it MIGHT have worked out ok, but with my luck the
> > odds were that it would give me a lot of grief before it was all said and
> > done.Thank you all
> >
> > I'll let you know how it all turns out.
> >
> >
> > Cheers
> > Mike Kear
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 2:12 AM, Money Pit 
> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Having been there/done that myself, I would follow Cameron's described
> > > route.  You don't want to be debugging so many different issues at once
> > on
> > > an OS you aren't intimately familiar with (and maybe not familiar at
> > all).
> > > You mentioned you are on Win2003.  Have you by chance missed out on
> > running
> > > CF on a 64-bit Win OS?  That was like manna from heaven when I first
> > > switched.
> > >
> > > Consider a Windows VPS from Viviotech.  They can license you a copy of
> CF
> > > Enterprise *very* inexpensively.  They are surprisingly robust for the
> > > prices charged, they are CF-literate and an excellent firm on general
> > > principles.  From there consider leasing another Windows VPS and put
> > Railo
> > > on it (Viviotech will do this for you for a small setup fee or for free
> > > IIRC).  Then tinker away, migrate a low-profile site over when you're
> > ready
> > > etc.  This is what I did with my personal sites.  You could take it a
> > step
> > > further and after mastering Railo, retire the Windows/Railo VPS, fire
> up
> > > one with linux and start over again on the tinkering so you limit your
> > > issues t

Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Jaime Metcher]

Coming in a couple of months late here, but I've just been through a move
from Windows/Adobe CF/MS SQL Server to Linux/Railo/MySQL and found a couple
of things not previously mentioned.

Windows -> Linux: already covered above, but I'll just add that anything
that turns into a file name (like CFC paths)  is also included in the
case-sensitivity issue.  One issue that hit me was case inconsistency in
strings stored in the database that were later used to build path names.

AdobeCF -> Railo: Even aside from the unsupported tags, syntax
compatibility although very good is not 100%.  See e.g.
http://lagod.id.au/blog/?p=378.  A lot of this will come down to coding
style - your code might be completely fine.  The big thing for me though is
the way Apache and Tomcat work together.   ACF goes to some lengths to
disappear the Tomcat layer and make the whole thing look like a web server
that miraculously knows what to do with cfm files.  Railo is much more of a
classic Tomcat app, in that it is definitely sitting behind the web server
with its own separate configuration.  I can go into more detail about the
consequences of that if you like, but if you take the path of least
resistance (use mod_cfml and make the Apache document root the same as the
Tomcat context root) then at the very least you end up with a dirty big
WEB-INF folder in your document root.

MSSQL -> MySQL:  CRUD queries will almost certainly be fine.  Heavy-weight
slicing and dicing queries probably won't.  There are lots of differences
in DDL (I have a very home-brewed set of regexes that did the trick for me
- happy to share).  Stored procedures will need to be completely
rewritten.  Many functions are different, but most have direct
equivalents.  One gotcha is that when MySQL is running on Linux, database
object names (e.g. table names) are case sensitive.

That sounds like a lot, but it is perfectly feasible to have one codebase
that will deploy and run happily in both environments (that might not be a
requirement for you, but it does illustrate that the differences are not
major).  My total changeover time was about six weeks, but I was completely
reworking my build and provisioning procedures at the same time.

Feel free to ping me on or off list if you want any more detail on any of
this.

Jaime


On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Mike K  wrote:

>
> Thank you everybody, I'm glad I asked.I have changed my plan now.
>  Cameron and others  made a  good point.   I was trying to do too many
> thing at once. My plan now is to get a new hosting environment as
> similar as possible to my current one, so its gives me the most chance that
> I'll be able to just copy everything over and most of it will work as is.
>  Then work from there on the transition to Linux or the cloud and Railo in
> two more steps.
>
> Thanks to a suggestion from another member of this list off-list I'm not
> going with the cloud just yet,  I'll go with a VPS at Viviotech and work
> from there.   So far every question I've asked they have said "yes we can
> do that all you do is    "
>
> Once again this group helps me out.  In this case, I can see if I had gone
> with my original plan,  it MIGHT have worked out ok, but with my luck the
> odds were that it would give me a lot of grief before it was all said and
> done.Thank you all
>
> I'll let you know how it all turns out.
>
>
> Cheers
> Mike Kear
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 2:12 AM, Money Pit  wrote:
>
> >
> > Having been there/done that myself, I would follow Cameron's described
> > route.  You don't want to be debugging so many different issues at once
> on
> > an OS you aren't intimately familiar with (and maybe not familiar at
> all).
> > You mentioned you are on Win2003.  Have you by chance missed out on
> running
> > CF on a 64-bit Win OS?  That was like manna from heaven when I first
> > switched.
> >
> > Consider a Windows VPS from Viviotech.  They can license you a copy of CF
> > Enterprise *very* inexpensively.  They are surprisingly robust for the
> > prices charged, they are CF-literate and an excellent firm on general
> > principles.  From there consider leasing another Windows VPS and put
> Railo
> > on it (Viviotech will do this for you for a small setup fee or for free
> > IIRC).  Then tinker away, migrate a low-profile site over when you're
> ready
> > etc.  This is what I did with my personal sites.  You could take it a
> step
> > further and after mastering Railo, retire the Windows/Railo VPS, fire up
> > one with linux and start over again on the tinkering so you limit your
> > issues to that part of the change.
> >
> > If you need more horsepower and have the budget for a CF license, look at
> > the blade servers at Cybercon; check out their hardware configs.  I don't
> > see how you can beat those prices.  My servers there have been absolutely
> > reliable.
> >
> > --
> > --m@Robertson--
> > Janitor, The Robertson Team
> > mysecretbase.com
> >
> >
> >
>
> 

~~~

Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Mike K]

Thank you everybody, I'm glad I asked.I have changed my plan now.
 Cameron and others  made a  good point.   I was trying to do too many
thing at once. My plan now is to get a new hosting environment as
similar as possible to my current one, so its gives me the most chance that
I'll be able to just copy everything over and most of it will work as is.
 Then work from there on the transition to Linux or the cloud and Railo in
two more steps.

Thanks to a suggestion from another member of this list off-list I'm not
going with the cloud just yet,  I'll go with a VPS at Viviotech and work
from there.   So far every question I've asked they have said "yes we can
do that all you do is    "

Once again this group helps me out.  In this case, I can see if I had gone
with my original plan,  it MIGHT have worked out ok, but with my luck the
odds were that it would give me a lot of grief before it was all said and
done.Thank you all

I'll let you know how it all turns out.


Cheers
Mike Kear



On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 2:12 AM, Money Pit  wrote:

>
> Having been there/done that myself, I would follow Cameron's described
> route.  You don't want to be debugging so many different issues at once on
> an OS you aren't intimately familiar with (and maybe not familiar at all).
> You mentioned you are on Win2003.  Have you by chance missed out on running
> CF on a 64-bit Win OS?  That was like manna from heaven when I first
> switched.
>
> Consider a Windows VPS from Viviotech.  They can license you a copy of CF
> Enterprise *very* inexpensively.  They are surprisingly robust for the
> prices charged, they are CF-literate and an excellent firm on general
> principles.  From there consider leasing another Windows VPS and put Railo
> on it (Viviotech will do this for you for a small setup fee or for free
> IIRC).  Then tinker away, migrate a low-profile site over when you're ready
> etc.  This is what I did with my personal sites.  You could take it a step
> further and after mastering Railo, retire the Windows/Railo VPS, fire up
> one with linux and start over again on the tinkering so you limit your
> issues to that part of the change.
>
> If you need more horsepower and have the budget for a CF license, look at
> the blade servers at Cybercon; check out their hardware configs.  I don't
> see how you can beat those prices.  My servers there have been absolutely
> reliable.
>
> --
> --m@Robertson--
> Janitor, The Robertson Team
> mysecretbase.com
>
>
> 

~|
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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Money Pit]

Having been there/done that myself, I would follow Cameron's described
route.  You don't want to be debugging so many different issues at once on
an OS you aren't intimately familiar with (and maybe not familiar at all).
You mentioned you are on Win2003.  Have you by chance missed out on running
CF on a 64-bit Win OS?  That was like manna from heaven when I first
switched.

Consider a Windows VPS from Viviotech.  They can license you a copy of CF
Enterprise *very* inexpensively.  They are surprisingly robust for the
prices charged, they are CF-literate and an excellent firm on general
principles.  From there consider leasing another Windows VPS and put Railo
on it (Viviotech will do this for you for a small setup fee or for free
IIRC).  Then tinker away, migrate a low-profile site over when you're ready
etc.  This is what I did with my personal sites.  You could take it a step
further and after mastering Railo, retire the Windows/Railo VPS, fire up
one with linux and start over again on the tinkering so you limit your
issues to that part of the change.

If you need more horsepower and have the budget for a CF license, look at
the blade servers at Cybercon; check out their hardware configs.  I don't
see how you can beat those prices.  My servers there have been absolutely
reliable.

-- 
--m@Robertson--
Janitor, The Robertson Team
mysecretbase.com


~|
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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Russ Michaels]

I will also mention, that running on Windows doe snot need to incur any
license costs
Most VPS hosts will give you Windows Server Web Edition for free, and some
can give ANY edition for FREE, because it doesn't cost them anything on
your SPLA licensing model.

You can also run Railo and CF together on the same server quite happily.


On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Cameron Childress wrote:

>
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K wrote:
>
> > I am thinking of a virtual server in the cloud,  moving to Linux and
> Railo
> > from Windows2003 Server and ColdFusion.
> >
>
> We are working on a similar move with a client right now and here's what
> advise I can give based on the decisions we made.
>
> Only change one thing at a time. You're contemplating changing 3 things at
> a time. If you are going to most hosts, move hosts and stay on Win/CF for
> now. If the site is important to your business (and it sounds like it is)
> am a big proponent of only changing one thing at a time.
>
> It sounds like your real immediate problem is hosting, I would solve that
> problem first. If you want to manage the servers yourself, look at Amazon
> or RackSpace or one of the cloud providers and move to windows VMs running
> there. Moving to a VM should be relatively straightforward and since this
> is the most urgent thing, I would do this one first. It should be the
> quickest, though you may have to deal with things like getting outbound
> email routed/whitelisted properly.
>
> I would bet you are thinking about moving to Linux/Railo since you're about
> to be responsible for license costs all the sudden that you don't have and
> are not cheap. Valid reason, but I would wait. Pay the extra money for the
> short term and move the code over to Linux/Railo later.
>
> Moving to Linux/Railo is not a bad move at all, and you can probably do
> these at the same time. However, you're probably going to want to spend
> some quality time with the code first. Sometimes it's easy as cake and no
> modifications are required tot he code at all. Sometimes it's more complex.
>
> I'm guessing you'll want to move to something like MySQL or another lower
> cost DB server as well. Just make sure that you give yourself some time to
> play with the Linux/Railo setup before you make the final move.
>
> Lastly, you might take a quick peek at RightScale for cloud server
> management / configuration management. It's basically Chef/Puppet scripts
> you can glue together to automate server deployments across various cloud
> platforms. The single user version is free last time I checked.
>
> http://www.rightscale.com/
>
> -Cameron
>
> --
> Cameron Childress
> --
> p:   678.637.5072
> im: cameroncf
> facebook  |
> twitter |
> google+ 
>
>
> 

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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Jon Clausen]

Mike,

Based on what you’ve outlined below, and what you’re already aware of, I would 
say the biggest challenge for your migration is going to be in migrating the 
databases from SQLServer.  That one can tricky but there are a number of good 
tools out there to help you do that. 

In answer to your other questions:

A)  
1) The case-sensitivity is the big issue with existing apps.   For 
relative paths in your apps, make sure you take a look at any hard-coded path 
delimiters as well and change back-slashes to slashes. The other challenges 
come on the differences in the configuration side of things. 
2) Linux distros are a matter of preference, and the debate can rage on 
forever. That said, CentOS is the winner in my book, hands down, for Coldfusion 
web application servers and for most dedicated database servers. The distro is 
active, well maintained, and just about every module or library you would need 
is actively developed to be compatible with CentOS/RedHat.  Ubuntu is a solid 
server distro as well, but falls a bit short to CentOS, IMHO, as a CF/Railo 
platform. 

B)
Yes, the move is relatively painless - even more so with Railo 4 than 
it was with Railo 3.  You may have some pain if you have apps that create or 
manipulate PDF’s extensively for reporting or CFChart as you may find some 
differences in the way they are rendered.  The unsupported tags list will help 
you there as it identifies where there are differences in functionality: 
https://github.com/getrailo/railo/wiki/CFML-tags-that-are-not-supported  You 
will miss the ability to drop a CF application in to a new webroot and go, but 
configuring the server.xml file for a new site is relatively painless.  You can 
also install mod_cfml to automate the process: http://www.modcfml.org/

A Control Panel is really helpful for administering multiple clients.  
VirtualMin is my preference among Linux CP’s.

HTH,
Jon


On Mar 28, 2014, at 5:21 AM, Mike K  wrote:

> 
> Yes yes yes, I know its been done and done again here.I'd like to know
> the opinion of some of you who've been down this road a few times  - its
> quite a while since I've moved hosts.. here's my issue:
> 
> I need to move to a new hosting company from the one I have my small
> business sites on.   These are the mom-pop businesses that make up quite a
> bit of my business.Typically they're relatively stable sites with a
> SQLServer2005 database in a shared hosting environment.
> 
> My hosting wholesaler has pissed me off once too often and I am going to
> move that part of my business somewhere else.
> 
> I am thinking of a virtual server in the cloud,  moving to Linux and Railo
> from Windows2003 Server and ColdFusion.
> 
> [A]  OS move:
> I'm aware from past experience that I'm going to get some links that fail
> because Linux is case sensitive in filenames and Windows isnt.   I've tried
> to be disciplined in using filenames because of that but I just know there
> are going to be some links or cflocations that fail on that account.
> 
> Are there any other 'gotchas' moving from windows to linux?
> 
> Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?
> 
> [B] Server environment move:
> 
> How about moving from ColdFusion (currently v9) to Railo?Is it REALLY
> compatible?   Am i really likely to be able to just copy my files to a
> Railo environment and have most of them work ok?   What's been your
> experience with that move?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheers
> Mike Kear
> Windsor, NSW, Australia
> Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
> AFP Webworks
> http://afpwebworks.com
> 
> 
> 

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Re: Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Cameron Childress]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Mike K wrote:

> I am thinking of a virtual server in the cloud,  moving to Linux and Railo
> from Windows2003 Server and ColdFusion.
>

We are working on a similar move with a client right now and here's what
advise I can give based on the decisions we made.

Only change one thing at a time. You're contemplating changing 3 things at
a time. If you are going to most hosts, move hosts and stay on Win/CF for
now. If the site is important to your business (and it sounds like it is)
am a big proponent of only changing one thing at a time.

It sounds like your real immediate problem is hosting, I would solve that
problem first. If you want to manage the servers yourself, look at Amazon
or RackSpace or one of the cloud providers and move to windows VMs running
there. Moving to a VM should be relatively straightforward and since this
is the most urgent thing, I would do this one first. It should be the
quickest, though you may have to deal with things like getting outbound
email routed/whitelisted properly.

I would bet you are thinking about moving to Linux/Railo since you're about
to be responsible for license costs all the sudden that you don't have and
are not cheap. Valid reason, but I would wait. Pay the extra money for the
short term and move the code over to Linux/Railo later.

Moving to Linux/Railo is not a bad move at all, and you can probably do
these at the same time. However, you're probably going to want to spend
some quality time with the code first. Sometimes it's easy as cake and no
modifications are required tot he code at all. Sometimes it's more complex.

I'm guessing you'll want to move to something like MySQL or another lower
cost DB server as well. Just make sure that you give yourself some time to
play with the Linux/Railo setup before you make the final move.

Lastly, you might take a quick peek at RightScale for cloud server
management / configuration management. It's basically Chef/Puppet scripts
you can glue together to automate server deployments across various cloud
platforms. The single user version is free last time I checked.

http://www.rightscale.com/

-Cameron

-- 
Cameron Childress
--
p:   678.637.5072
im: cameroncf
facebook  |
twitter |
google+ 


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Moving part of my hosting business - thoughts about my plan please ...

[Mike K]

Yes yes yes, I know its been done and done again here.I'd like to know
the opinion of some of you who've been down this road a few times  - its
quite a while since I've moved hosts.. here's my issue:

I need to move to a new hosting company from the one I have my small
business sites on.   These are the mom-pop businesses that make up quite a
bit of my business.Typically they're relatively stable sites with a
SQLServer2005 database in a shared hosting environment.

My hosting wholesaler has pissed me off once too often and I am going to
move that part of my business somewhere else.

I am thinking of a virtual server in the cloud,  moving to Linux and Railo
from Windows2003 Server and ColdFusion.

[A]  OS move:
I'm aware from past experience that I'm going to get some links that fail
because Linux is case sensitive in filenames and Windows isnt.   I've tried
to be disciplined in using filenames because of that but I just know there
are going to be some links or cflocations that fail on that account.

Are there any other 'gotchas' moving from windows to linux?

Is there any benefit of one flavour of Linux over another?

[B] Server environment move:

How about moving from ColdFusion (currently v9) to Railo?Is it REALLY
compatible?   Am i really likely to be able to just copy my files to a
Railo environment and have most of them work ok?   What's been your
experience with that move?



-- 
Cheers
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com


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