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Turnkey Linux Wordpress Installation Questions
Hi,
I'm thinking of using the Trunkey Linux Wordpress distro to build an Intranet for my company. Before I install it I'm wondering how I should scale the storage. I'm going to be installing it as a VMware virtual machine and can build whatever disk size I need. But having never done this before I'm not sure how to decide.
The installation videos I've looked at all select a real small disk size, which I know would be filled up pretty fast under normal use. Is there a rule of thumb for this kind of decision?
Also, my vision is to have a page for each department and allow the department heads rights to add their own content. I'm guessing this is best handled by a multi-site configuration, am I correct in this assessment?
Thanks in advance,
Linn
Replies (5)
If space is no issue then make it big now
Reply 1Small environment
Reply 2Hi Jeremy,
Is it easy to increase the size of Turnkey Linux vm? I am more of a Windows admin, hardly no experience with Linux. If it is then great, I won't worry too much about it. But if it is a hastle I'd rather make the space now and not have to deal with it for a long time.
We are a small organization, only about 75 users all in one building. So I don't expect a lot of traffic or huge amounts of files being added. Probably mostly cute or funny pics that users seem to like to use to dress up email messages and probably web pages and the occasional pictures from a party or work gathering.
Thanks for responding,
Linn
No hard and fast answers
Reply 3A multisite setup might be the best way of managing the different departments. But without knowing more about your intended usage, where the different departments are (e.g. same building? different country?) and what sort of infrastructure you have (e.g. powerful servers with lots of overhead, corporate grade hardware switches with internal 10 Gigabit fibre internal network vs VM running on someone's desktop with consumer grade router using 100Megabit ethernet cables) there may be options that would work better (e.g. a separate WordPress VM for each department?)
50GB should be TONS!!
Reply 4As for resizing virtual HDDs, as you suggest, the theory is exactly the same. I suggest that you worry about finding the right commands when the time comes to use them. But there are tons of resources online. FWIW though the quickest, easiest way to check HDD space within Linux is the 'df' command, use the '-h' (human readable) switch to make it use meaningful units (KB/MB/GB/TB as opposed to bytes). That will give you something like this:
# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 28G 17G 9.9G 63% / udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev tmpfs 774M 25M 750M 4% /run tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sdb1 99G 13G 81G 14% /turnkey/fab/products
You can ignore the udev & tmpfs entries (they don't actually take up room). /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 are my 2 separate vHDDs. As you can see I have about 130GB available and am currently using 30GB.
FWIW this is my development server which is about a year old and contains the source code to the ENTIRE TurnKey library (actually it contains 2 copies of all the source). It also contains a number of built appliances (in ISOs and other build formats) and appliances in a partially built state. I do clean it up every now and again, but I've never filled it since I added the second (~100GB - /dev/sdb1) vHDD.
If you keep in mind that TurnKey Linux is built on top of Debian (v14.x = Debian Jessie/8) then you will find tons of resources online. Ubuntu is also derived from Debian so often suggestions relating to Ubuntu will also be useful (although be aware that not always...).
As you say, if you break it you can start again. Even once you start using it, if you use TurnKey's automated backup - TKLBAM then you could migrate your data to a new server really easily, or create a new server to test something out...
Space is a bit of an issue right now
Reply 5We are a bit limited on space on our current storage array but working to get a new one, hopefully soon. But I think I can spare 50GB or maybe 75GB. But I'm not sure how fast I'd fill that.
I know that with Windows servers I can increase the size of the virtual disk but then I have to use Windows tools to expand the volume to make use of the new space. I'm guessing I'd need to perform a similar task with Linux, but don't know enough about Linux to know how yet. Now that I think about it I don't even know how to tell how much space I'm using on a Linux box.
There are lots of articles on line on how to make WordPress multi-site, it looks pretty easy. But that's the nice thing about open source and Turnkey, if I screw it up I can delete and start over. :0)
Obviously not having to touch it is better, so if hard drive space is not an issue then by all means make it as big as you like right from the start. AFAIK extending virtual harddrives is pretty straight forward (regardless of the OS on top) but TBH it's been a long time since I've used anything other than Linux for anything in depth so YMMV with other OS.
For a small organisation a single server set up to host multisite is probably a really good way to go. Note though that TurnKey isn't set up for that OOTB and I've never done it so not quite sure how you would go about that. We do have some docs but they are really old so I suspect that they are outdated. Please feel free to post your notes if/when you successfully set WordPress up as a multisite.
No worries! :)