I have a Ruby app which runs fine on the command line, but I want to embed it in a web page. This leaves me with a problem, since both of the machines available for me to do this with are running slightly older versions of Mandriva Linux (one 2005, one 2006.0) which don’t natively support mod_ruby.
This laptop, on the other hand (it’s 2007.0), took about 15 seconds to find & install it. Sadly, I need to carry the laptop around, so can’t leave it hooked up as a toy web-server.
One of the machines has been sitting on someone’s carpet for so long that the CPU overheats if I run an update on it, so it thermally shuts down & reboots before installing anything.
The other one runs several websites on specific versions of PostgreSQL, which are of course going to be difficult about updating smoothly. And it also runs as a workstation, which means that I have to kick someone off to update it. )-:
Both of them are DNS & email servers, as well as web servers, so even if I could update one immediately, all of those services would be down while I did it.
So... because I’m going to have to do some load-shuffling if we bounce off Sugarloaf Point, what I’m probably going to do now (although not, alas, in time to deliver this Ruby app) is clone these servers onto another one which I have kicking about, then update their email & stuff literally side-by-side & swap across to the new machine.
Which will be mounted further out of reach of the dust.
Alternatively, I could compile a mod_ruby on one of the machines, then have to deal with an out-of-date machine from the other side of Australia. Interesting, but...
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