Not my usual kind of thing, but a possible new client meant preparing a system to stand up a replica of their production environment. These are my notes.

I started by downloading an .iso of ubuntu-12.04-server and deploying it to a new VM.

Critical things to remember:

  • Set up two network adapters in the virtual machine config: NAT, and Host-only networking, as per my notes documented elsewhere;
  • select [X] LAMP server during the deployment to give it Apache/MySQL/PHP in one hit, at startup;
  • install ssh so you can remote into it
$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client

Checking for installed status:

$ which php
/usr/bin/php
 
$ sudo service apache2 status
[sudo] password for colin: ****
Apache2 is running (pid 1107).
 
$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password: ****
..
mysql>

By default, the Apache web server document root folder appears to be:

$ ls -l /var/www
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 177 Dec 6 12:10 index.html
$

Allowing connections to MySQL from outside the server

Edit /etc/mysql/my.conf:

Comment out the line:

#bind-address    = 127.0.0.1

Run the following SQL(might not be required, note the 0 rows affected):

mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'root'@'%' identified by '****' with grant option;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Restart the DB:

$ sudo service mysql stop
mysql stop/waiting
 
$ sudo service mysql start
mysql start/running, process 1578

And, importantly, test from outside (in my case, my host operating system):

C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin> mysql -h 192.168.56.56 -u root -p
Enter password: ****
...
mysql>

In MySQL Workbench:

image

Cool.

Installing FTP server

Just in case we need to move files in and out of the test environment (which we almost certainly will need to do), we’ll set up an FTP server. The most suggested option seems to be something called vsftpd:

Reference: https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/how-to-install-and-configure-vsftpd-on-ubuntu-12-04-lts/

When I tried this, I got an error:

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd
[sudo] password for colin: ***
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package vsftpd is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
 
E: Package 'vsftpd' has no installation candidate

Long story short, the following sequence of instructions worked for me:

1. un-comment the extras.ubuntu.com repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list:

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Ubuntu's
## 'extras' repository.
## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party
## developers who want to ship their latest software.
deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main

2. Remove old information, and update:

$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
$ sudo apt-get update

3. try installing again:

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  vsftpd
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 129 not upgraded.
Need to get 124 kB of archives.
After this operation, 342 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main vsftpd amd64 2.3.5-1ubuntu2 [124 kB]
Fetched 124 kB in 1s (91.2 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously unselected package vsftpd.
(Reading database ... 53560 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking vsftpd (from .../vsftpd_2.3.5-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Processing triggers for ureadahead ...
Setting up vsftpd (2.3.5-1ubuntu2) ...
vsftpd start/running, process 2229
$

Thank goodness for that!

Some configuration required in /etc/vsftpd.conf, see:

basically

write_enable=YES
local_umask=022

Restart:

$ sudo service vsftpd restart
vsftpd stop/waiting
vsftpd start/running, process 2462
$

Now, testing from the Windows host:

C:\PROGRA~2\WinSCP>WinSCP
winscp> open 192.168.56.56
Searching for host...
Connecting to host...
Authenticating...
Username: colin
Password: ****
Authenticated.
Starting the session...
Session started.
Active session: [1] 192.168.56.56
winscp>

OK, I think it is all ready for us to unpack that archive we got from the client and see about deploying into the test environment.