[Cialug] minimizing exposure with web hosting

[Matthew Nuzum]

Hi, I'm working on providing a free web-hosting service to local developers
who need a playground. I'm calling it the "web hosting lending library"
because it works like a library. You check out one of the sites for 2 weeks
and you can renew it if slots are available.

The service provides PHP, CGI, Rails, Django/wsgi, MySQL, MongoDB and
Memcached support.

Currently I'm only intending to allow webdav access because my initial
thinking was that it minimized my security exposure. However this presents
problems with cgi, rails and django. CGI because I can't figure out how to
chmod+x using webdav. For to make any non-trivial apps with rails and django
you need shell access to run rake db:migrate or manage.py syncdb.

So now I'm stuck with figuring out a clever solution to enable devs to do
these commands.

Or maybe I should rethink the logic behind my sense of security.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on ways to accommodate solutions. I'm really
looking for something easy to setup and maintain to provide this service to
people that I have a moderate level of trust in.

BTW, I'm calling this a limited beta now. If you're interested in trying it
out, please contact me and I'll set you up. I'm working on the disclaimer
still but it's going along the lines of "don't screw up my server or do
stupid stuff like spam people; it's only for dev / experimenting purposes."

I've talked to numerous people who want to try out mongo or rails or django
and need some semi-public playground, so that's what this is aiming to
provide.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter

"Never stop learning" –Robert Nuzum (My dad)
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