amn's questions

I wonder how much data in total does a freshly installed vanilla Linux system (like 32-bit CentOS 5.10) read in order to get to a virtual console shell prompt? You know, reading all the configuration files, loading binaries, kernel image, etc.

I am booting 100s of Linux machines, and 95% of their system contents are identical and will remain identical - the machines are clones. I would like to offload the identical/read-only shared part of the filesystem, to an NFS storage, mount it from there, and boot like that. Only writeable part of the filesystem, like /var, /tmp and /home, will remain local to each machine. Since potentially hundred machines may boot simultaneously as part of a "cluster", I need to estimate whether the accessed NFS storage link will be a bottleneck while booting from.

I am looking for order-of-magnitude estimates. I am aware that Linux boot varies greatly with regards to details of the process. Are we talking 10Mb? 100Mb? 1Gb?

I have both Apache and PHP set up manually, albeit the latter without CURL.

There is this jungle of instructions and explanations on extensions for PHP.

I have a very straightforward question - what do I need to do to enable CURL in a more dynamic way. I resent the idea of static linking, in fact I hate and avoid static linking like the plague. Is it possible to have my Apache and PHP understand that there is CURL in town? I can compile CURL if necessary.

I would like to know how to accomplish this without package management, i.e. building it all myself.

I have always been somewhat reluctant to "outsource" site statistics to Google.

We have an Apache server running on a Windows server. I am pretty sure all the foundation to collect the needed visitor data are there.

I would like to stop using GA, and use some form of application where the data does not travel to a third party but remains at the host, or at least travels to the remote administrator, if it is a log analyzer in a browser.

What are my options?

I am developing a site, which will make use of any given [variation of] subdomain name part (that is, the part prefixed before the host name and, optionally, the TLD part). I would imagine that in production, that would be an easy feat - make sure the DNS for second-level domain name part points to an IP, set up Apache2 virtual host to listen on that (or any) IP port 80, and just use PHP to make decisions based on the "Host" request header.

However, currently the site is localhost, since I am developing it using my workstation, so first I patched the /etc/hosts to include:

127.0.0.1 mydomain

I only used one name part (arguably a custom TLD) so as to not interfere with the Internet domain names. Then I set up a VirtualHost directive for Apache 2.2 like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName mydomain

But now I can see that f.e. example.mydomain does not point to localhost, meaning the the /etc/hosts addition is not effective for "something.mydomain". It appears the rules are taken verbatim, and also I have checked that wildcards like *.mydomain are not allowed.

Is there a solution for this?