# In need of a Rails Application Support Specialist - Please h **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [September 13, 2006, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566 "2006-09-13T17:37:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/1 "2006-09-13T17:37:42Z")
Hi all, Thanks in advance for any help. I’ve been contracted by a company to develop a website; somewhat of a ‘social networking’ site that’s fairly complicated. I’m working by myself. My background is as a developer in Java and .NET. I’ve worked as a lead developer/architect on dozens of large projects for mid to large-sized companies. Though a little off topic for this post, let me say that I chose Ruby on Rails because of its simple but helpful API. I found [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) to be ridiculously complex and poorly documented. Its seemingly elegant solutions prove to be too difficult to implement in practice. Indeed, you spend way too much time trying to do things that should be simple and straightforward. Trying to understand the flow of control amongst web controls is something I never plan to do again. As for Java, there seemed to be way too many disparate parts/frameworks that one had to master for the pluming of the application. In my experience, the pluming is only a small part of an application. I don’t need it to do too much. Just offer fine grained tools for the basics and stay out of my way. Also, I enjoy working with interpreted, weakly-typed languages like Ruby…and it’s perfect since I’m not developing software for rocket science. My issue is this: I’m in the midst of developing the code of the application, but I’m realizing that I need help setting up and supporting the operation of the application. I’ve been able to learn what I need, and write code very fast, but the hosting and runtime support of the application is something that with my limited experience, I’m spending way too much time making sense of. I’m not sure what my options are and I was wondering if anyone had some suggestions. I chose to go with TextDrive for my hosting, and decided on their solaris container solution (which is virtually having your own machine). Once I paid, they simply sent me an IP address and some passwords and that was it. Thus the offering that I chose assumes that I’m pretty strong with my system admin and configuration skills, which I’m not. Only their shared solutions provide some documentation, but I’m not sure how much it helps, and that you don’t need to have strong sys admin skills with that solution too. It’s possible that I didn’t chose the service that suits my needs. It seems to me that with Ruby and Rails, one can single-handedly develop pretty sophisticated web applications. But without additional support to setup and operate the site, this may not be a reality. How should I connect from my Windows laptop to the Solaris box in terms of editing my files? What about the setup for Subversion? What’s inetd? What about backing up my repositories? Which is the best application server configuration for rails? Can’t I just get back to the code? I need an organization who helps set these things up and helps to keep the system running smoothly, making sure that logs aren’t going to overflow, that sessions are destroyed, that backups are performed, etc. Someone who’s done it before. Is there not an offering of this type? Some organization that provides these services? Not just a company that offers hosting solutions, but that has services to help you along the way? Where I can pay for a full-time person now, and later a part-time person. I can’t afford to find and pay a local full-time sys admin who would need to ramp up on supporting rails. Can’t I find some organization that can offer these services at a lower price since they also do it for dozens if not hundreds of other rails developers? Sorry if I’ve been long-winded or repetitive, and thanks again for your help. James ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 6:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/2 "2006-09-13T18:16:05Z")
Hi James: I feel your pain, we’re in similar boats. I was a windows coder for years, and recently turned to RoR. I took to the language right away, and with a little help from the boards, had a nice app on my hands. Then came time for deployment. It’s taken 2-3 times as long for me just to get the environment setup on a public server than it has taken to design and code the sucker. I gave up on using any shared host right away, since I was too restricted. Then I ended up getting my own hosted server at [theplanet.com](http://theplanet.com), I chose Debian as the OS. So now I needed to become a linux admin, set up Subversion, mySQL, Ruby, Rails, Mongrel to work with Apache 2, and a Postfix email server. 3 months later (working very part time) and I’m still fighting configuration problems, albeit small ones. It was a steep learning curve, and my brain still hurts, but I eventually fought through it. in hind sight, I might have gone with a windows server rather than a linux box. I just created a lot of problems having to learn linux on top of everything. Linux is the way to go, but I would have just been happy to get everything up and running in a familiar environment and migrated at my liesure later on. Joe PS If you have any questions feel free to email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 6:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/3 "2006-09-13T18:29:50Z")
Thanks for sharing Joe! It’s nice to know I’m not unique. ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 9:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/4 "2006-09-13T21:47:32Z")
Mike G. wrote: > On 9/13/06, jkaplan [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > my suggestion is to learn these things yourself… Application > deployment has gotten a lot easier with great tools such as mongrel > and capistrano. It may be complicated at first, and take away from > your development time, but learn it once, and you’ll never have to pay > another person to do it for you. > > > It seems to me that with Ruby and Rails, one can single-handedly > > develop pretty sophisticated web applications. But without additional > > support to setup and operate the site, this may not be a reality. How > > should I connect from my Windows laptop to the Solaris box in terms of > > editing my files? > > I use subversion on a local freebsd machine for all my development. > When I’m ready to go into production or commit the changes, I use > capistrano to push my code to all the servers. > > _snip_ > Mike I agree 100%, it’s totally worth doing yourself. That’s the exact setup I finally got running - everything except Capistrano is going 100% now, which is my weekend chore. I ended up with some troubles using Debian as I couldnt get the exact versions of some things I wanted (such as apache 2.2 - I’m using mod\_proxy and it’s working for now) if they didn’t have a package for something made. ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 10:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/5 "2006-09-13T22:12:24Z")
On 9/13/06, Joe C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I ended up with some troubles using Debian as I couldnt get the exact > versions of some things I wanted (such as apache 2.2 - I’m using > mod\_proxy and it’s working for now) if they didn’t have a package for > something made. I’m running RHEL 4 on the production machine with (ugh) plesk and they didn’t have a package for apache 2.2 either, so I ended up compiling from source… It’s a pain in the ass, since it doesn’t integrate with plesk, but it was much easier than trying to get an RPM for 2.2 that plays nicely with plesk (speaking of which, anyone else here using Plesk with mod\_proxy, Apache 2.2 and mongrel? I’d love to get a binary version of Apache 2.2 running with plesk, rather than using my self compiled version). Mike ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 9:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/6 "2006-09-13T21:26:17Z")
On 9/13/06, jkaplan [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: my suggestion is to learn these things yourself… Application deployment has gotten a lot easier with great tools such as mongrel and capistrano. It may be complicated at first, and take away from your development time, but learn it once, and you’ll never have to pay another person to do it for you. > It seems to me that with Ruby and Rails, one can single-handedly > develop pretty sophisticated web applications. But without additional > support to setup and operate the site, this may not be a reality. How > should I connect from my Windows laptop to the Solaris box in terms of > editing my files? I use subversion on a local freebsd machine for all my development. When I’m ready to go into production or commit the changes, I use capistrano to push my code to all the servers. > What about the setup for Subversion? subversion isn’t too difficult, but it’s an absolute necessity to use some type of version control system as a developer. If you’re not currently using one, you should seriously consider learning subversion. > What’s > inetd? inetd is a server that listens on certain defined ports and launches the appropriate service for the given port when a connection attempt is made. > What about backing up my repositories? I just use a cron job that tars and encrypts my repositories, backs up the databases and uses rsync for any other files each night. > Which is the best > application server configuration for rails? The trend these days seems to be Apache 2.2 using mod\_proxy\_balancer and a cluster of Mongrel servers, with Capistrano and subversion to deploy. > I need an organization who helps set these things up and helps to keep > the system running smoothly, making sure that logs aren’t going to > overflow, that sessions are destroyed, that backups are performed, etc. > Someone who’s done it before. I realize that you weren’t asking these questions to have them answered, but I thought I’d give you some details just in case you were interested in going it alone. Mike ---
**Author:** ![jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/dc4da7/32.png) [@jkaplan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jkaplan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 11:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/in-need-of-a-rails-application-support-specialist-please-h/68566/7 "2006-09-13T23:26:44Z")
jkaplan wrote: > I need an organization who helps set these things up and helps to keep > the system running smoothly, making sure that logs aren’t going to > overflow, that sessions are destroyed, that backups are performed, etc. > Someone who’s done it before. Now you know what unix Admins are for 🙂 seriously though, I manage global scale web servers and you need an Admin with experience in web servers, proxies, Switches, networking, DNS and unix tuning. Operations and Development should not be the same person. As a Unix admin who’s now writing enterprise rails code, I know your pain but from the other side. I can tell you that like languages, there is no “best solution”, only one that you like working with. Since you’re on a solaris host, you should be able to find a few million candidates who would be willing to consult. If you can offer a $100-200 an hour you can get some serious candidates who can whip up some standards for you to play with pretty quicky and let you get back to coding. seriously, it’s not expensive to hire a unix geek who’s done this before. I can write you apache configs, shared drives, log rotation, backups and code repositories in 2 days. Proxies and switch configs would be another day. I’m sure others could as well. Or just find a local geek who will work for much less and have him waste his free time setting up servers for you. I once had a 14yr old intern who kicked ass …for free because he was doing geekier stuff then his peers. he now charges several hundred an hour and flies around the World ,so he thought it was a good investment. if you just need to setup apache/mysql then it’s pretty simple and you should try it yourself. you might loose a day, but gain a lifetime of knowledge.