- Is it better to have a dedicated server for each project/company or
can we use e.g. 1 server for 3 OpenAcs-instances?
As with everything, you can safely say 'it depends on the project'.
Depending on the horse-power you buy, you are probably better off
buying one really fast machine (i.e. with lots of RAM and a good SCSI
disks) and running all sites from that machine (and its backup). That
way all sites benefit from the heavier machine. I'd venture to guess
that any single site will not be maxing out the machine, so running
the sites from one machine will give a much better peak performance -
more bang for your guilder.
The 1Ghz Athlon you should be able to run at least 4 OpenACS instances
without a running a sweat. I don't have exact figures for about loads,
but I would not worry too much. If the load gets too high, just
migrate one or more instances to another machine (which is simple).
- Which OpenAcs version?
3.2.5 if you want to go live now, 4.x if you can endure a bit of patience.
- Server security
Don't fret too much on it. Avoid things like BIND (8.x requires root
priviliges use tinydns or something, better yet, don't run your DNS on
your webserver), telnet (use ssh), rsh. Avoid sendmail, use qmail. My
personal server runs rh6.2 as a basis, all public services are non
standard (for RH), so none of the rh-script-kiddie exploits work (I
see five of those 'attacks' every day). If you want to defend agains
professionals, hire a full time security guy/monitoring.
- SSL and AOLserver
See my documents as well at
http://pascal.scheffers.net/openacs/
it may help.
Give the P133 a bit more RAM and you will see it perform much, much
better. My K6-400 has 256MB RAM and is very responsive with three
OpenACS instances.
