PostgreSQL on Red Hat Linux Bootstraps On-Line Mall

LXer Feature: 5-Aug-2006 Bill MacArthur is a general IT guy for an On-Line Shopping Mall. He chose PostgreSQL running on Red Hat Linux to drive the business.

Background

Most of the time, you read about some mega-multi-national corporation running GNU/Linux. However, smaller businesses stand to benefit tremendously from GNU/Linux and a FOSS stack. I ran across Bill MacArthur, the all-round IT guy for The Discount Home Shoppers' Club. He was kind enough to answer some questions about his operation.

Interview

How long have you been in the IT field? Doing GNU/Linux?

It's almost 6 years now.

Tell me a little about your company.

The Discount Home Shoppers' Club, Inc. is located in sunny, southwest Florida in a town called Englewood. My nutshell explanation of the company: An online shopping mall offering rewards for shoppers, but, also offering business opportunity aspects since it is driven by a pseudo network marketing orgnaization. (the website parlance is 'Managed Organizational Marketing')

You mentioned (in private e-mail) that your shop runs all Red Hat servers, with Windows on the desktop. What led you to go that route?

My first look at the 'internet' was through a dial-up unix shell. I remember dabbling with Slackware 3 when it was on 4? diskettes. Later on I cut my IT teeth on a linux server. When I started with the Club, it was my first job in IT. They already had plenty of windows PCs and were doing shared hosting. I brought it all in house, and of course, FOSS had great appeal to the owner since this has been a bootstrap operation. Besides, I would have been like a fish out of water trying to do stuff with windows servers. Notwithstanding anything else, my trepidation with windows security would prevent me from using it for anything exposed to the internet. Shoot, I tell single PC home users on broadband to get a router just for the cheap invisibility it provides against profiling.

How many servers do you have?

We have seven linux servers in all, everything from a quad processor Dell 6450 down to a couple of recycled PCs. Those older machines aren't worth much running windows, but as dedicated linux smtp servers, they running flawlessly day in and day out doing special purpose, targeted mail.

Aside from Apache and the XML processing, what kind of services do your servers perform?

Our biggest machines perform as databases. Actually one is offline right now until we get the time to setup a failover/load balancing solution between the 2.

Our next largest server is our web server, which besides providing static content, also delivers a wide variety of dynamic content including all of the reporting functions and website applications necessary to enable the marketing organization as well as real time information for consumers themselves. It also performs tracking/redirection to vendors and will soon be performing pixel tag sales tracking.

Our corporate 'mail' server takes care of incoming/outgoing dhs-club.com mail. It also performs as a caching name server for our LAN as well as the other servers. It also runs our NTP service. Besides the 2 'PC' servers doing targeted mail, we have one large server that does personalized member mailings in bulk.

What are your biggest headaches?

Too much to do... too little time. I'm a very low key person and we really haven't had any issues, so besides the inability to get everything done in programming development, system administration and future planning, I haven't had any 'headaches'. :)

What task(s) take up the most time?

There is nothing that really stands out as my responsibilities are so varied. One thing pesky I have to do daily, since we don't trust the RBLs, is to keep my finger in the spam dike. Besides using spamassassin (a somewhat dated version), we maintain our own RBL of sorts. In the near future, my intent is to automate most of this away with an IMAP system that will easily enable automated spam defense processing. In the meantime, taking care of this is a daily chore with a measurable cost, but certainly not anything I would rate too highly.

Anything else that you think would be of interest?

We're tickled with Postgres. We have hammered that database in the past using 7.x versions and it never has given us a problem. With 8.1 on our new server, it is sweeter than ever. As a matter of fact, we have never had an OS/software problem that I can recall. (besides software of our own building ).

Our downtime over the years has revolved around hardware issues only. In the early days we stressed those machines to loads of 20+ and although they understandably became a bit unresponsive, they always came back to life on their own without intervention. That is a fine testimony to the linux platform and to apache and postgres.