Hi folks,

I'm curious about the collective knowledge within the community on matters relating to the setup and deployment of production Linux servers.

Personally, I've been able to setup a development LAMP machine from scratch, which I kept hidden away on a LAN and thus enabled me to develop code for deployment onto a production server hosted by a 'normal' webhosting company. I setup my machine to mirror the essential services I was making use of on my live site. It took me 3 months of almost daily work to accomplish this feat (as I saw it at the time). I used ISPConfig3 to achieve this, and didn't concern myself with things like DNS, Firewalls, Print servers, email authentication, SSH access etc. So it was purely Debian Sarge Linux, Apache 2.2, PHP5, MySQL5 (with the dependencies that tie them all together).

I've posted a survey with this thread and ask those who choose to participate to answer in accordance to what their skill/knowledge levels were when they first signed up for a VPS (rather than including what you've learned since, hopefully heaps).
Those at the Olympian level and above I would presume can do so without needing to ask others for help. Those below, need a guiding hand.

Cheers,
Napoleon BlownApart

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My VPS system:
(Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Kernel 3.15.4-x86_64, Apache 2.4.7, MariaDB Server 5.5.40, MariaDB Client 5.5.41, PHP 5.5.9, ISPConfig 3.0.5.4p5, Webmin, PureFTP & Quota, phpMyAdmin, postfix, dovecot, amavis, clamav, spamassassin, awstats, fail2ban, Jailkit, bind9, vlogger, webalizer)