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I was a bit surprised when installing Apache 2.4 on Amazon EC2 T3 instance that chkconfig did not work like it does on my T2 instances; instead you use systemctl.

Here is a bit of a conversion table for the two.

List processes
chkconfig:

# chkconfig –list
systemd:

# systemctl list-units
Enable a service
chkconfig:

# chkconfig <servicename> on
systemd:

# systemctl enable <servicename>.service
Disable a service
chkconfig:

# chkconfig <servicename> off
systemd:

# systemctl disable <servicename>.service
Start a service
chkconfig:

# service <servicename> start
systemd:

# systemctl start <servicename>.service
Stop a service
chkconfig:

# service <servicename> stop
systemd:

# systemctl stop <servicename>.service
Check the status of a service
chkconfig:

# service <servicename> status
systemd:

# systemctl status <servicename>.service

I believe this is because the Amazon T3 instances have updated Centos, Rhel and Fedora features.

If we take a peak at the operating system we see

This has happened to me more than once so I thought I’d jot it down. Many times when you read tutorials on how to install different software packages on Linux you will simply see

sudo yum install package_name

However this may not install the version of the software you actually intended.

For example, say you want to install Apache httpd server.

A tutorial will say

sudo yum install httpd

Apache at the time of this writing is Apache 2.4 and running the above common on my Amazon instance would actually install Apache 2.1.

So here are some steps to walk through to make sure you install what you think you are installing when using a package manager.

1) See if the software package is installed and if it is the version you intend to install.

you list all installed software packages with

yum list intalled

but why not narrow it down if you know the package name. Use wildcard for good measure in case there are multiple version out there.

yum list httpd*

2) If it is not listed, then you need to install it but check to see what version would be installed.

For example,

sudo yum install httpd will install Apache HTTP Server 2.2

3) Install the version you want

First we need to see what versions are available in our repositories.

There we are the Apache HTTP version we want, 2.4.

PathAuto

Must have for human readable urls instead of urls like /node/1

MetaTags

You will want to control each pages title tags and meta description for search results listing and SEO.

Google Analytics

You will want data on who is visiting you website and their interactions. This modules allows you to track customize which roles you track.

Simple XML sitemap

You will need this for SEO and Google Webmasters tools et al.

ReCaptcha

If you plan to let users sign up and sign in this is a must have module. Spam bots can easily detected Drupal’s login url and form so protect yourself before you have a lot of annoying accounts to delete.

The simplest virtual hosts

When an HTTP request comes into the IP address and Port 80, the Apache server will detect the hostname in the request and route the request to the directory declared in the DocumentRoot.

Adding www

It is still not uncommon for people to search for domains by adding www, for example http://butlerraines.com and http://www.butlerraines.com.

To make them both route to the same place we simply add a ServerAlias declaration in our virtualhost. Now when someone visits http://butlerraines.com or http://www.butlerraines.com they will be served the same files.

This is of course assuming you have set up your DNS to point www to your IP address.

Serving files from a user’s home directory.

Writing Apache error and access logs to a user’s home directory.