Installing Mapserver on a remote server - linux

I'm quite new to UMN Mapserver and started learning and so far I've only being experimenting on my localhost. Maybe I'm overthinking about it but what if I wanted my application let's say to be on the internet "alive." I believe this does not necessarily mean that I have to set up a server at my home... right? So could I install Mapserver on a server I'm renting let's say ? Sorry if it's irrelevant question but just trying to understand the underlying logic

Yes, install it anywhere you want. You just have to install the data on that server also.

Related

How to deploy a nodejs application to google cloud?

I'm trying to deploy a nodejs application to google cloud, I've posted several SO questions about the errors I've been getting and how to fix them. Let me illustrate my endeavours...
problem 1) I tried following the tutorial, the hello world app deployment. When I entered the command to deploy,
$ gcloud preview app deploy app.yaml --set-default
It gave me an error saying managed vms aren't available for your application's region. I contacted someone from Google, a technical support representative from google, said his name was Ling, and he said he "wasn't aware managed vms weren't supported in India" and he wanted me to point out where I found that information. So I sent him this, note one of the answers. OK.....
problem 2) So, I was stuck, didn't really know what to do. Searched "how to deploy nodejs app on google cloud" and found a video in which a google developer informed me that there are "two main ways to run your application in the cloud, infrastructure as a service and platform as a service". Running it on app engine was the platform as a service, and that was off the list so I went with my only remaining option. There is a tutorial, the bookshelf app tutorial, also by google, and the last part describes how to run your application on the compute engine. I tried to go through the tutorial, but when I entered the command
git push cloud 7-gce:master
to push my code to the repository, it's asking me for my username and password, It never mentioned that in the tutorial, I don't know what to enter. I found this question but I'm not sure it applies to my situation. So next I went through some tutorials suggested by Zachary Newman, and I wasn't able to follow the tutorial where they use the ubuntu because when they tell you to hello.js file, it's really weird because I had to ssh into the ubuntu image vm I created and everything was really slow, I'm not familiar with commands on linux so I had to look up how to "save and exit" after creating the hello.js file. I got the "web server" to run, it's the reverse proxy nginx server, but since I don't know what the APP_PRIVATE_IP_ADDRESS is, when I accessed the page, I could see the nginx page but not the "hello world" message that's supposed to display. Please see the Prerequisites heading to see what the tutorial was trying to teach me. OK....
problem 3) On the google developers console, once you log in, there is a navigation section on the left, there is a link to the "Cloud Launcher". In there I found a link to create a Virtual Machine with nodejs installed, it's created by Bitnami. I clicked it and my vm was running, I went to the external ip address provided, and saw a Congratulations (ugh...) page by Bitnami. I didn't really know what to do from there, so I posted another SO question. A bitnami developer told me I "need to copy your files to the remote repository, create the configuration files and after that you have to include that configuration in the configuration of Apache to serve the application". How?!?! He just posted a link as well to a bitnami wiki page. I used filezilla to connect to my vm, and I tried to upload my application files to the vm. I was able to upload everything except the node modules (they were taking too long to upload and for some reason the ftp client kept loosing the connection with the server after 10 minutes or so of uploading). So I thought I would just ssh into the instance and try to npm install my dependencies. But it gave me more errors...
problem 4) I don't know why this post was put on hold, but I found this. I can't find the exact page right now but I read somewhere in the google docs that we can't ssh into an instance as root/administrator by design, and that we have to perform some advanced configuration in order to be able to do this. THE PROBLEM is that I can't install the dependencies unless I ssh in as an administrator....:'( So I just uploaded my node modules with filezilla. Everything looks good to go, I ssh into my instance and I cd into my application directory and enter the command
node app.js
and almost as if to taunt me, it console logs out "connected to mongo...." and "Listening on port 3000.....". I get so excited, I think it's working.....
problem 4) The server never really started running I think, it wasn't able to connect to the mongodb database (another instance) that I was running, this was the command to connect to the mongodb instance in my app.js file
mongoose.connect('mongodb://****/myappdatabase');
where the **** indicates the external IP of my mongodb instances. After about 5 minutes, I get an error on the ssh browser
Error: connect ETIMEDOUT ****:27017
BUT WHO HAS TIME TO READ ALL OF THIS RIGHT?
I'm not a developer, I don't have much experience with programming (close to zero actually). I'm a hobbyist. I picked up a book on c programming by stephen g. kochan about 5 or 6 months ago, and since then, I've just been following tutorials on the internet, a programming in java book, and some reference material. I wanted to create a website.
I learned some html, css, javascript and jquery off of w3schools and went through some tutorials on creating a basic node server and serving some html pages, that's literally all my application does. That's all I want it to do.
I used the express framework for node, and mongoose to connect to my mongodb running locally. Socket.io for a little bit of networking. I created the website for fun and I would really like to host it and share it with my friends, I made it this far, it would be really embarrassing to quit now because I can't host the website. I went through a lot more than what I posted on this question by the way.
Now I would really appreciate some help, even some guidance as to what I need to know, maybe books I should read or documentation I should go through to become more familiar with website hosting would be great. I am going to offer this question up for a bounty in 2 days but until then, if there is anyone that went through this and would like to help for no personal gain of their own, your saving my life. I've been going at this for about 4 days with no luck. Thanks and let me know if there is anything you would like to know about my application. I mean seriously, how hard could it be, I'm doing something (or everything) terribly wrong.
Wow dude. I thought about flagging this, but you appear to genuinely want to learn to program and need help. And experienced coders teaching novice coders is what this site is all about. So, here we go.
First and foremost, Linux is your friend. Learn it. Use it. I don’t use Ubuntu, but you should. Use 14.04 because it’s a forgiving disto and comes cram-packed with things you need when you’re just learning.
Time to address your questions:
Problem 1: you are using a gcloud preview product. Those are awesome, but not for beginners because you don’t know what you’re doing. Just stand up an Ubuntu instance on an n1-standard and rock it. No bells. No whistles. Learn Ubuntu linux with the same passion that you taught yourself how to program a web site.
Problem 2: Don’t use git. I use git every day and it’s awesome, but you have a long way to go and git is hella confusing. Take your workspace, tar/gzip it and just ssh the whole shebang to cloud. Then unzip it and you’ll have your whole code right there on your server. Caveat: never do this professionally. But for someone just learning … small bites dude … small bites.
Problem 3: Don’t use Bitnami pre-built images. It robs you of the opportunity learning how to do this from scratch and that is an invaluable experience. Here are two commands you must learn:
apt-get update
apt-get install <insert thing you want to install>
That’s it. Not rocket science and you will discover the power of package management on linux.
Problem 4: You are over-thinking this. For real, learn apt-get. It will get you so far, you’ll curse yourself for not using it earlier. apt-get node. apt-get mongo. And slam it all on one instance. Is that what I do professionally? Hell no. But it’s all about baby steps when you combine dev-ops with programming and you need to take those steps.
Errata: You wanted someone to recommend a book or a website or guidance. All you need to know is already on Ubuntu. They are called man pages. It’s short for manual. You can buy all the books in the world off Amazon and watch infinite youtube pages. It won’t compare to simply maning commands. You gotta trust me on this.
In summary: Just create an Ubuntu instance. tar and gzip all your code and scp it to your instance. Learn apt-get and for real, you are set. You will totally destroy your instance many times. So just delete it, re-create it, and keep starting over. Each time, you will be wiser and smarter than the time before. I tutor novice developers all the time. You gotta start small and work your way up. Eventually you’ll understand why you’d want to use git. Why you want to scale. Why LXC is amazing. Why GCE’s managed instance and VMs are crazy baller, and why scripting your deployment is a best practice. But first you have to understand how to build an instance and get your code there in any way possible. You’ll grow from there. Good luck, buddy.

Is using 'forever' still the suggested approach to run nodejs as a linux/unix service?

In the past couple of years NodeJS became a major player in the server landscape - and I really find it hard to believe that there is no decent way to have nodejs run as a service on a linux box. On Windows we have iisnode - but for non Windows environments the forever package is suggested as the way to go - instead of a real solution.
Is there maybe a servicized version of nodejs out there that I could not locate?
There isn't a "servicized" version of Node.js available in the sense you are thinking. Keeping your Node application running (for example in the event of a fatal error) is up to you entirely.
As suggested in the first comment, this is fairly subjective, but really there are two big packages (and one or two alternative methods) for making a service out of your Node application. As you've mentioned, forever is a popular choice. If you've never taken a look at pm2, I suggest doing so, as it offers some services that forever does not. Alternatively, you could search for information on supervisord, which I've had success with in the past. Finally, daemonizing Node with upstart is something to look at if the others don't fit well for you.

How to keep my stack alive

I'm an experienced dev, but new to the sysadmin side of things. I'm running a node.js application, that uses a redis database and has nginx running a reverse proxy to server the node pages over https.
My concern is that one or all 3 will fall over under heavy load or error and there's nothing to get it started back up. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
My server is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Many thanks =)
One of the best option is to use upstart.
The original documentation is pretty complicated, but take a look:
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/
And here is what you exactly need, if I correctly understand your issue:
http://blog.joshsoftware.com/2012/02/14/upstart-scripts-in-ubuntu/
I found the easiest setup and ongoing monitoring for a new sysadmin came from Monit (http://mmonit.com/monit/)
There is a new solution for that called pm2. I use it and it's working fine.

Configuring Apache Tomcat to run PHP

I would like to start out by apologizing. I have very little knowledge in the areas of Linux and Servers. I have been asked at work to set up a Linux box running Apache Tomcat. The Server needs to be enabled to allow websockets. I managed to get Debian installed. During the installation it gave me the option to make it a web server, which I did. There are now some different folders and files that are named "apache" in the files system, so my guess is that I am in fact running Apache, but to be honest I'm not 100% sure, and if it is, I don't know if its Tomcat. I fumbled around a bit and figured out the IP address of the computer I installed on and tried going to that IP from another computer in the network and it worked. I was able to see the html file that I put in the /var/www folder on the host machine. I then went out and found a nice piece of code, someone was kind enough to share, that is suppose to test websockets capability but I cant seem to get it working. My thinking is that my server isn't allowing PHP to run. I came to this conclusion by testing. I took a web page from my other server, its written in PHP, that when opened will send a text to my phone. Its just a small piece of code that I used for testing. When I tried running it from the Linux server it wont run, meaning it wont send the text to my phone. So here I am. I realize I'm asking for a simple solution to a complex problem, but I'm under the gun so to speak. I have about a week to get this going, so I just don't have the time to really immerse my self in this stuff the way I would like to. My question in its simplest form is"How do I configure my server to run PHP?" Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you all for your time and patience.
Have you tried running a simple PHP script like echo 'Hello World';??
If not then try, if it works then your PHP is up, but sockets are just not configured to use.
If it doesn't work then install Ubuntu, a simple newbie friendly interface for Linux, and then install LAMP, here its how to do it.
And don't panic.

Node Js how to get started

I'm a newbie JavaScript programmer who wants to experiment with server side JavaScript using Node.Js on my Mac
I downloaded NodeJs and the wizard installed it, but now I can't see it in my applications?
1) How do I open it and start using it? Do I do it from the command line? if so, how do I start?
2) Can I connect it to a MySQL database I have installed with MAMP?
Thanks if you can help
To start node, you open a terminal and type:
/path/to/node scriptname.js
Depending on how you installed node, the actual location of node may vary. You should figure that out. You should probably add that path to your PATH environment variable. If you do this then you can simply type
node scriptname.js
There are plenty of samples around the net. As for mysql connectivity, check this out.
I am in pretty much in the same boat as you are, and I highly recommend you to watch the meetup talk by Ryan Dahl on http://nodejs.org/
It is only about an hour long, but it pretty shows you how you can use it for your own non-blocking applications.
In terms of driver for accessing SQL, you will need to install NPM http://npmjs.org/
You can do a quick search http://search.npmjs.org/, on the support for MySQL. Because node.js is still relatively new to the scene, you will see quite a bit of choices competing to meet your goal

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