First questions from a greenhorn

[rajco]

I have heard a lot about Alfresco but never used. This is an initial enquiry, please be patient.

The teachers of our school are looking for a server based, easy to use file sharing system which can be used independently amoung various groups and also integrates with the school Moodle, version 1.9. We have our own dedicated Debian 6, 64 bit server, which runs only LAMP and an (outward bound) mail server.

The external file sharing must be group based, the owner can open files or directories to different groups which are either defined in the LDAP or assign manually. The upload ideally browser based, or ftp.

The integration with Moodle can be described as a personal directory tree. The owner can link files or subdirectories from his personal directory to courses where he is the teacher.

Almost forgot, yes, the username and password are in the LDAP, basically OUs.

Is Alfresco the right thing?

What system software, in addition to the LAMP + Mail we have, do we need to install?

I saw the binary alfresco-community-4.0.d-installer-linux-x64.bin. What does it install? It is important because even for testing we have to install Alfresco on our school server, no LDAP access otherwise. The last thing I want is a disruption in the school server.

[loftux]

Hi,

You can do all those things, and for what I know there is an integration to Moodle available.

What I will advice against is to install Alfresco on that existing server. You should get yourself a dedicated server, Alfresco requires quite a lot of resources to run smoothly. Espscially if it has to compete with other services like mail. So get yourself some extra hardware, you can still use create an alfresco database on your existing server if you already have a database service there.

[rajco]

Hi Loftux

You can do all those things, and for what I know there is an integration to Moodle available.

Thanks, it is a relief!

What I will advice against is to install Alfresco on that existing server. You should get yourself a dedicated server, Alfresco requires quite a lot of resources to run smoothly.

If the problem is just ressources, that shouldn't be a concern. This is a beefy server (Inter Core i7 920 2.67 GHz, 12 GB RAM!

Espscially if it has to compete with other services like mail.

What I hope of course, is that Alfresco won't hijack my exisiting services (ports SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP to out side, MySQL in localhost).

you can still use create an alfresco database on your existing server if you already have a database service there.

Could you point me to some information on that?

What I still want to know is, what kind of system software /middle ware / services /ports Alfresco will install or take charge of?

[mrogers]

The alfresco installer will install everything needed.

It will run HTTP on 8080,   HTTPS on 8443.

There will be a confict with the inbound SMTP port (25) if you turn it on.

[rajco]

Hi mrogers

Thanks a lot!

I try first on a virtual machine and then on the production server. Will definitely come back with more questions.
😉

[rajco]

As feared, I have to come back.
;-(

My initial test in a VM, VirtualBox on Linux, crashed. During reboot I noticed the low memory warnings and increated RAM from 512 to 1536 MB. From what I can judge it starts now.

First thing I did war to remove exim4 which was installed by the (fresh) Debian Squeeze. Alfresco comes with Postfix, right?

I've noticed in the boot script that starts PostgreSQL, tomcat, JRE, … 
and ports 21 (ftp), 111 (rpcbind), 631 (ipp), 5432 (postgresql), 7070 (realserver), 8009 (ajp13), 8080 (http-proxy), 8100 (unknown), 8443 (https-alt), 50500 (unknown). Are these correct?

Can I safely assume all these software are in /opt ?

And by not starting the bootscript /etc/init.d/alfresco and restarting my old /etc/init.d/postfix my server

I know, I am overly cautious. As you can guess, I want to shift to the production server, and want no breakdowns. OK, I have offsite backups etc, but rebuilding the whole thing needs a couple of hours.

Thanks in advance …

[mrogers]

You can play with Alfresco with that little RAM but it will need more for production rule of thumb is at least 4GB.

port 7070 is the jetty server for SPP.
port 8100 is for Open Office.
port 50500 is the RMI registry.

Didn't understand your sentence:
"First thing I did war to remove exim4 which was installed by the (fresh) Debian Squeeze. Alfresco comes with Postfix, right?"

[rajco]

Hi rmorges

Thanks very much, this is great help.

The exim4 story was, since I installed Alfresco on a fresh Debian Squeeze (on a VM), exim4 was already running. I thought, I saw postfix in a boot message from Alfresco and didn't want both competing for the port 25. In the VM I stopped exim4. In the production server I have postfix running, don't want to stop it for obvious reasons.

One remaining point: If you can confirm that all Alfresco software go to /opt I will feel more relaxed.

[mrogers]

It will go where you put it!

But the default is for /opt/alfesco