Updated: October 14 2007
Updates available at virtualappliances.net
For technical support:
The LAMP Virtual Appliance comes with a complete application stack consisting of:
The LAMP Virtual Appliance is 100% preconfigured and ready to go out of the box!
Most popular web applications requiring a LAMP application stack can be dropped into place and run.
This includes WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, punBB, MediaWiki, Gallery, and many more!
The following URLs are immediately accessible upon booting the LAMP VA*:
The web server document root is shared as "wwwroot" using the standard SMB/CIFS protocol.
The default SMB/CIFS user name/password is "admin/admin".
The wwwroot share can be accessed by any capable Windows or SMB (e.g. Samba on Linux) client using the following UNC path:
\\<IP address or host name of VA>\wwwroot
This share can be disabled using the VA Management Console (under Configure -> Samba).
For security purposes, it is strongly recommended to disable the Samba server once completed importing files into the web server.
* URLs containing the host name "lamp.local." will only be accessible if the client has Multicast DNS or Bonjour (on Windows) installed. Please consult documentation below.
Because the LAMP VA is built on top of Ubuntu, it has integrated package management. This allows the end-user to add applications as required.
In order to keep download sizes to a minimum, the APT repository in the LAMP VA is uninitialized.
To initialize the APT repository, enter at the shell prompt:
apt-get update
To install all available updates:
apt-get upgrade
Note: The LAMP VA has been customized using stock Ubuntu packages. It is possible that a yet-to-be-released software update can alter this customization and change the behaviour of the LAMP VA.
To search for a package:
apt-get search package
To install a package:
apt-get install package
For more information, consult the Command-line package management with APT section of the Documentation for Ubuntu 7.04.
The default username/password is root/root.
Please change this password if using the LAMP VA in a production environment.
The password can be changed using the passwd command from a shell prompt.
Note: As there is currently no Virtual Appliances Management Console interface for the SSH server, it is up to the user to manually disable the SSH daemon as necessary.
Multicast DNS, or mDNS, allows the Virtual Appliance to be referenced by the host name:
<hostname>.local.
All Virtual Appliances are mDNS aware. In order to make Windows & Linux clients mDNS aware, it is necessary to configure and/or enable the functionality.
Install the freely downloadable Bonjour for Windows package from Apple.
nss-mdns needs to be installed and configured. It is included in most current Linux distributions.
By default, the LAMP VA does not allow outside network access to the on-board MySQL server. This does not, however, prevent a hosted web application from inadvertently allowing MySQL superuser access.
The default MySQL superuser name is 'root' without a password.
It is STRONGLY recommended that MySQL user privileges be reviewed prior to making a MySQL server publicly accessible. In particular, it is essential that a password be applied to the 'root' user.
For more information, see the MySQL 5.0 manual section General Security Issues.
The default memory limit for a PHP script is 128MB.
The PHP configuration file is found in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini within the LAMP VA filesystem.
phpMyAdmin is a comprehensive management/administration tool for MySQL. It provides all the functionality required to manage users, and databases through an SSL web interface and comes pre-installed.
The default filesystem size for the LAMP Virtual Appliance is 2GB, of which approximately 1GB is free for use.
It is now possible to add an additional virtual hard disk to the LAMP VA to expand the database capacity. See "Additional Virtual Hard Disk" section below.
It is very easy to add additional storage to the LAMP VA!
Simply create a second hard disk in VMware or XenServer and attach it to the LAMP VA. The new VHD will be automatically detected, initialized, and existing data migrated from the first hard disk. This all occurs all without user interaction at boot-time.
Best Practice:
If the hosted web application(s) and/or MySQL databases are known to eventually grow larger than the free space in the boot hard disk, add a VHD to the LAMP VA prior to first boot.
This alleviates the need for adding a VHD later and the downtime required to migrate existing data.
Please consult VMware Documentation or XenServer Product Family Support Documentation for more information on adding a second virtual hard disk.
The configuration file for the Virtual Appliance can be found at /etc/virtualappliances.conf. It can be easily backed up and migrated to other VAs as necessary.
Use phpMyAdmin or other remote MySQL administration tool to create/manage database backups.
The mysqldump shell application can also be accessed from within the LAMP VA.
The default memory allocation for the LAMP VA is 256MB. Please adjust accordingly depending on system load and database size(s).
The Webalizer (Apache log file analysis) is pre-installed and configured to run daily with DNS name resolution enabled and history enabled (automatically maintains 1 year of historical log information).
It can be accessed from:
http://<IP address/host name of VA>/webalizer
or
http://lamp.local./webablizer, if mDNS is enabled.