Updated: October 14 2007
Updates available at virtualappliances.net
For technical support:
The LAPP Virtual Appliance comes with a complete application stack consisting of:
The LAPP Virtual Appliance is 100% preconfigured and ready to go out of the box!
Most popular web applications requiring a LAPP application stack can be dropped into place and run.
The following URLs are immediately accessible upon booting the LAPP 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 "lapp.local." will only be accessible if the client has Multicast DNS or Bonjour (on Windows) installed. Please consult documentation below.
Because the LAPP VA is built on top of Ubuntu, it has integrated package management. This allows the end-user to add applications as required.
To install all available updates:
apt-get upgrade
Note: The LAPP 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 LAPP 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 LAPP 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.
The installed version of PostgreSQL is 8.2.4 (as shipped with Ubuntu 7.04 Server Edition)
===== PLEASE READ BEFORE USING POSTGRESQL AND/OR PHPPGADMIN =====
The default security settings for phpPgAdmin do *NOT* allow certain users (pgsql, postgres, root, or administrator) to login. This means it is necessary to create a new user (with or without superuser privileges) in order to access phpPgAdmin.
NOTE: THERE IS NO BUILT-IN DEFAULT USER THAT WILL ALLOW ACCESS TO PHPPGADMIN WITHOUT FOLLOWING THESE INSTRUCTIONS.
Use the built-in PostgreSQL 'createuser' utility from the shell prompt to create a new PostgreSQL user as follows:
root@lapp:~# su -c 'createuser -P admin' postgres Enter password for new role:Enter it again: Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) y CREATE ROLE
Using the above example and the user name "admin" with password "admin" will create a superuser with the same login credentials as the older Virtual Appliances PostgreSQL server.
It is *not* necessary to name the user/role "admin".
It is the end-user's repsonsibility to adequately lockdown PostgreSQL and phpPgAdmin. If in doubt, consult the PostgreSQL and/or phpPgAdmin documentation.
Links:
PostgreSQL 8.2.4 Documentation
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/index.html
phpPgAdmin
http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net
The default memory limit for a PHP script is 128MB.
The PHP configuration file is found in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini within the LAPP VA filesystem.
phpPgAdmin is a comprehensive management/administration tool for PostgreSQL. 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 LAPP 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 LAPP VA to expand the database capacity. See "Additional Virtual Hard Disk" section below.
It is very easy to add additional storage to the LAPP VA!
Simply create a second hard disk in VMware, Virtual PC/Virtual Server, or XenServer and attach it to the LAPP 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 PostgreSQL databases are known to eventually grow larger than the free space in the boot hard disk, add a VHD to the LAPP 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 phpPgAdmin or other remote PostgreSQL administration tool to create/manage database backups.
The default memory allocation for the LAPP 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:
https://<IP address/host name of VA>/webalizer
or
https://lapp.local./webablizer, if mDNS is enabled.