For RMOUG (February 17 – 18, 2010) this year, I have a presentation called, “APEX – Moves from the Garage to the Basement”. I wasn’t sure if my presentation would be accepted based on the title. Who knew? The title is actually supposed to be a play on the real life story of HP starting their business in the Garage. For developer’s today, the same can be accomplished with a spare PC, Internet connection, and a few pieces of software including ApEx. To get this really going, I added information on setting up dyndns with a cable modem, which is the setup I personally have, and seems fairly common. This can be extended to most any broadband setup as well. The idea of the basement came from my own setup as well. I have a 24 port gigabit switch in my basement, so I setup a small table that has an old PC and a UPS next to the router.

I also have a domain name and use the custom dyndns service for less than 30 dollars (US) a year. An extra bonus, is Mail for Google Apps. I run the server from by basement, but have all of my mail routed through Google. That isn’t part of the presentation, but thought I would add that. Google, for me, just can’t be beat when used as a spam filter. I used to run my own mail server with postfix and spam-assassin. I just couldn’t keep up with the new ways I was getting spam, and really didn’t appreciate what was coming through and available to my kids. Using Google as a filter has solved this issue about 99.999 percent of the time.

I will add postings of how I set this up soon. Right now, the latest Ubuntu LTS server has been released, and I need to check this out with another virtual machine install. As for that, if anyone wants to know, I use both VMWare and VirtualBox. I had almost made the switch to VirtualBox completely, but am waiting to see what the fallout of this software will be with the Sun acquisition by Oracle. I have always though Oracle’s VM Software was lacking, so it will be interesting to see what develops! I wish I could be testing ApEx 4.0 as well with the new server VM. That will have to wait for another post when the software becomes available to the general public.