Are Debian LAMP Server Installations Always this Easy?

RJM62

Touchdown! Greaser!
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I had to do a bare-metal installation of Debian with LAMP today. I'm not sure whether I'd ever done one before. If I did, it was was a long time ago. I've been a Red Hat / Centos / Fedora guy for a long time.

I do use Linux Mint (which is Debian-based) on some of my desktops and laptops, and I've long used Mepis to fix unbootable Windows machines, but I don't believe I've ever set up or used a Debian server before.

What happened was that I needed a local testing server. I'd been using one of my servers at Equinix in Chicago for testing, but the bandwidth was starting to add up. So I dragged an old Athlon X2 machine out of the basement and decided to install RHEL 7 on it.

The problem was that RHEL 7 vomited on the nVidia NIC. Then I tried CentOS 7, and predictably, the same thing happened. I tried a handful of NICs that I had in the basement, but none of them worked. Apparently RH ditched kernel support for a whole ****load of non-gigabit NICs in RHEL 7.

I suppose there are drivers out there somewhere, but I really didn't feel like farting around on forums looking for them. Because I have only a free developer license for RHEL, they won't talk to me; so the only support is from the forums.

I also didn't feel like making a 200-mile round-trip to and from Microcenter just to buy a NIC that RHEL would like. (No, there's no place closer. I checked.) I thought about ordering one from Amazon or borrowing the unused Intel WiFi adapter from my Windows desktop (which RHEL does support, for some unfathomable reason). But then I figured I'd give Debian a shot. A friend of mine converted to it recently and he hasn't stopped talking about how great it is. So I downloaded the Debian Netinstall ISO, burned it, and popped it in.

Everything just worked. No missing dependencies, no unreachable hosts, no indecipherable hardware errors, none of that. I installed a minimal Debian OS, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; created a virtual host; uploaded an existing site into it; and presto, there it was.

I was actually surprised. I'd never done such an easy server installation. I've had more trouble with some pre-compiled VMs than I did with this bare-metal install.

The only change I had to make was editing the PHP configuration to run code beginning with <? rather than <?php. That was it. Total time from popping the disk in the drive to having a fully-functional Web server was about 45 minutes, on old hardware and my recently-upgraded 75 Mbps Internet connection, with not a single cuss word uttered.

Rich
 
Yup. Altho I've been using Ubuntu, I've heard great things about Denebian.
 
This morning's upgrade to PHP 7 also went flawlessly. It took a while to compile on the older hardware, but it worked perfectly once it was done.

That was actually one of the other reasons I wanted a local testing server: I want to test all the sites locally using PHP 7 before upgrading my production servers. I initially installed PHP 5.6 on the local server, however, to make it easier to distinguish between any problems with the PHP installation as opposed to the version. But other than needing to enable short_open_tag in Apache's php.ini, there were no problems to debug.

I'm really starting to like Debian as a server.

Rich
 
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