NYCPHP Meetup

[Chris Snyder]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Daniel Krook <krook at us.ibm.com> wrote:

>
> Chris, Hans, I never made the leap myself, but isn't much of this why you
> two advocate/d the BSDs for AMP development? What's the reason for either
> of you considering Ubuntu/CentOS today?


I made the switch from FreeBSD to Debian a few years ago (okay, 10 years
ago now, jeez) because my employer was wedded to DELL hardware and Linux
seemed to play more nicely with it. Also, apt-get was just too easy to
ignore. I created a few meta packages that would patch a minimal install
with exactly what I needed, including a hand-compiled PHP.

When EC2 became available, I wanted to switch back, but FreeBSD wasn't
supported at the time. Debian's ever-more-complicated filesystem is causing
me to rethink whether I stick with it long-term.

>
> As consultants, I understand you have to deal with some legacy client
> infrastructure and may not be able to define the "ideal OS" but what would
> you use if you had it your way?
>

The ideal OS would be something like MediaTemple's Grid Service, or
Google's App Engine, where someone else is managing the infrastructure and
underlying OS, and you get an isolated container with guaranteed resource
allocation plus on-demand scaling. Virtualization, but with only the
userland virtualized.

>
> How much do you really care to influence what choices are made at the OS
> or PHP version level? What are the make/break configurations you absolutely
> must have control over?
>

PHP extensions allow magic to happen.

I guess the main thing, if you're planning to provide this kind of
environment, is not to give clients control over things like installed
packages and extensions and PHP configurations - - that's just asking for
trouble, and could be used by a noob or attacker to destabilize system or
break out of whatever jail you have them in.

But do give clients the ability to request these things and make the system
flexible enough that it's easy for your sysadmins to grant reasonable
requests. I don't need control over whether Zip is enabled in PHP, but if I
need it to be able to work with .xlsx files, then you need to be able to
turn it on for me. Does that make sense?
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