Blazing Moon

Installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

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Mission-Critical and Confidential

As with any ILS, a production Koha implementation is a mission-critical application: if it goes down or doesn't work well it will undermine your core business functions, and many people will become very unhappy for many different reasons.

It also contains confidential information—e.g., patron circulation records—and so must be kept secure.

Publicly hosting a mission-critical web application that includes confidential information is not for dabblers or the technologically timid.

Unless, of course, you want your mission-critical web application to crash intermittently, compromise your patrons' confidential information, and become a viral pit of despair and a haven for armies of malicious geeks and demoniacal pranksters.

In that case go ahead. Forget I warned you about anything.

If you're considering hosting your own live, production Koha implementation, it's important that you understand what you're getting into.

Before you take Koha into production with live data it's critical that you seek sound advice from one or more competent web/Linux system administrators.

I am definitely not a competent system administrator, so this section is simply a collection of my (informed, I hope) opinions. Please take it as such.

What You'll Need

Koha is free. Competent application- and system administration and support is not.

I'm not qualified to administer a production web server, but through years of developing and deploying web-based applications for sensitive information I've worked with a number of people who are. Here's what I know.

To proceed with a production Koha implementation you'll either need your own IT staff with the required expertise, or you'll need to contract with someone who has it. That might be a local or national IT consulting firm or an organization like LibLime that specializes in Koha implementations.

In any case you must have:

  • A server and network connectivity that can support your expected peak levels of use.
  • Some means of ensuring that the application remains available (for example, a failover server in case the production server goes down), or else a thoughtful decision not to have such measures in place and an acceptance that periodic downtime is possible.
  • One or more people with the time and expertise to set up and security-harden your production server and your network.
  • One or more people with the time and expertise to monitor it regularly, ensuring it is functioning properly and its security hasn't been breached—people committed to remaining current on best practices for security and system administration.
  • One or more people with the time and expertise to respond quickly when there are application, server, or network problems, or when the system's security is compromised.
  • Funding, both up-front and ongoing, to support all of the above.

There are more things of course, but your competent application- and system-administrators can work with you on the details.

External Hosting

One way to address some of these issues is to locate Koha with an independent web host (one supporting shell access and virtual private servers). There are hundreds of web hosts to choose from.

This is far from a panacea. While this will relieve you of many security and system administration issues, you're also putting both your trust and your patron information in the hands of a third party company. Not all web hosts deserve this trust. Of the ones that do, not all will remain that way.

Application Troubleshooting: An Example

This thread from a Koha newsgroup is a good example of some moderately hairy diagnostic work in response to an issue with the optional Zebra search engine. I include it here to illustrate a point: embark on a Koha implementation only if someone in your organization or someone you contract with is willing and able to tackle troubleshooting of this sort when needed.

And on a happier note...

Koha is a wonderful and Free Open Source software package developed by a community of people who are trying to make the world a better place and who believe high-quality software should be freely available.

Though I've outlined a somewhat imposing list of logistical considerations above, there are many successful production Koha implementations in the world, there will be many more, and there are plenty of good people out there who can help you to have one if it's the direction you choose.

If all has gone well you've just installed a test bed where you can better understand how Koha would work for your organization. I believe you'll not only find the software to be of high quality, but the online community to be helpful and supportive.

Best of luck with your investigation and the choices you have ahead.