One of the things I've promised the sponsors for the upcoming Bootcamp 
is that I'll be working on a HOWTO for other groups to plan their own 
Bootcamp. It'll be a permanent part of the ZPUG site and a way to thank 
the community for giving us such a rich toolset.

The bootcamp has got me thinking about the sysadmin bits. It's unsung 
side of delivering robust apps. If you hang out in #plone you'll see 
there are a constant stream of questions about how to set up ZEO, 
what's the best way to install Zope, how should one upgrade, and so 
forth. Sometimes there will even be questions about Squid and clusters. 
Yikes!

I think this would be a nifty class and I'd greatly value your input 
either on or off list. If there's enough positive interest I'll develop 
a course over the summer and do the first one at AU in the fall. If 
they'll have us back.

Cheers,
Jules

PS Here are some initial musings: http://www.jules.com/blog/4

PPS As it's for admins it wouldn't start until 10am and there would be 
espresso at 10:15am. But it would run though 7pm. And then there would 
be drinking. You know, like your regular day-to-day admin's life.

As a sysadmin I have embraced many of the "best practice" techniques
for running production Plone servers such as: 

o Rolling your own (compiling) Python, Zope; and installing CMFPlone + assorted
Products
  (as opposed to using system binaries and packaged installers respectively).

o ZEO backend (as opposed to using one Data.fs per instance).

o Apache rewrites for choosing which urls to send to zope and which to send
  to the filesystem (static content served by apache and/or php code *eek*) . 

o Development sandboxes to separate dabbling from production, featuring 
  roll-your-own scripts to make it easy to create Zope instances on the fly.

o Symbolic links for Products from X number of Zope instances to 1 Products
directory.

I've also had to do some not-so-nice things like "skinning" static content to
make 
it look like Plone and using a Zope PHP interpreter to "privatize" a PHP 
message board via Zope security (almost got banned from #plone for this one).

So I'd love to participate in a Plone Admins Bootcamp, assuming of course that
Jules
is not kidding about the 10:15 espresso and post-class drinking ;-) In
particular
I'm interested in Squid configuration and load balancing and maybe some corrupt
ZODB fixing. These are the last pieces of the puzzle for me.

Alex

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 10:20:49PM -0400, Jules wrote:[...]
[...]

Alex Clark <aclark(at)aclark.NET> writes:
[...]

I know Joel has a Best Practices doc out and mentioned some other
practices in email.  This is a great topic.  Any chance of combining
such wisdom in some centeral place on plone.org?