After 17 complete installations (including the OS) on both Ubuntu 20.04 and CentOS 8.2, I finally was able to get an up-to-date installation on CentOS 8.2. Trying to follow antiquated installation instructions from the diasporafoundation.org site proved both frustrating and futile. The most helpful installation instructions I found was this … https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-run-an-open-source-distributed-social-network-with-diaspora-on-centos-7. It turned out the major obstacle to getting a working installation on CentOS 8.2 was to place SELinux in “permissive” mode.
My pod will run on the CentOS 8.2 installation for the near future.
My observations after these numerous attempts at getting a working pod are these:
- “Howto” instructions on the diasporafoundation.org web site MUST be updated to include instructions for most recent popular distributions. These instructions should include details regarding AppArmor, SELinux, etc., security systems which might prevent the newly installed web site from being accessible. Instructions should also include listings of the necessary apache / nginx modules necessary for successful deployment of a diaspora* pod.
- The Ubuntu 20.04 diaspora-installer-mysql package produced a working installation but used a version 7.6 of the diaspora packages that contained a security vulnerability. Updating to the current version 7.14 was unsuccessful.
- The Ubuntu 20.04 diaspora-installer-mysql package was the best thought out installation method because it placed the diaspora executables in a system library (/var/lib/diaspora) with symbolic links to those executables in /usr/share/diaspora. Placing the diaspora executables in a home folder (/home/diaspora/diaspora) is not a Linux best practice and should be changed to follow the Ubuntu / Debian model.
- Startup and shutdown of diaspora* should be achieved through systemctl start / stop methods. Existing instructions on the diasporafoundation.org web site do not give any hint regarding how to shut down diaspora*.