Install Koha on Ubuntu — Part 6: Going Live

Warn­ing: this tuto­r­ial was devel­oped in 2008, and is for ver­sions of Koha and Ubuntu that are now con­sid­ered quite old. If you want to install the cur­rent ver­sion of Koha on Ubuntu, please visit Koha on Ubuntu at the Koha Com­mu­nity wiki.

This is part 6 of 6 in a tuto­r­ial series on installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10.

So far we’ve installed and con­fig­ured Linux, laid the ground­work for Koha, installed and con­fig­ured Koha, and played around with it a little.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing the next step—using Koha for actual library hold­ings and actual patrons—this final arti­cle is for you.

If you plan to put Koha into pro­duc­tion for real-world Library use there are many other things you need to con­sider. The final arti­cle in the series, Going Live, dis­cusses this further.

Show­time!

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 gen­eral IT con­sult­ing firm or an orga­ni­za­tion that spe­cial­izes in Koha imple­men­ta­tions. The Koha Library Soft­ware Com­mu­nity pro­vides a page list­ing orga­ni­za­tions that install and/or sup­port Koha.

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.

This Blaz­ing Moon arti­cle gives some advice on research­ing and choos­ing a web host.

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.