[Cialug] minimizing exposure with web hosting

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

Cool idea. Thanks for offering this service to the community.

Could you provide ssh access but with a restricted and/or chrooted 
shell? From the documentation, rssh seems particularly suited to this, 
though i've not used it myself.

On 2010-08-02 at 10:33:25, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
>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.
-- 
Daniel A. Ramaley
Network Engineer 2

Dial Center 118, Drake University
2407 Carpenter Ave / Des Moines IA 50311 USA
Tel: +1 515 271-4540
Fax: +1 515 271-1938
E-mail: daniel.ramaley at drake.edu