(Q)Installing Aegir 0.4 alpha 9 (soon to be alpha 10) over Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta) at Linode on Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid)

Hello all,

First thank you for all the work that has been put into Aegir and Mercury/Pantheon. I've been keeping an eye on both for a while and am ready to jump in. While my needs aren't heavy ... yet. A current project has the potential to need the power and scalability of Mercury/Pantheon and I want Aegir to make life simpler for implementing new sites and creating test development environments. So with that in mind I am creating a new server at Linode and will be migrating my sites(mostly D6 with one D5) from my old standard server.

Since I am converting from a box that wasn't using Apache/Solr, had no reverse proxy(Varnish) or caching such as APC/memcached in place I don't have to have those options fully in place on day one. I can activate those as I get a handle on their unique twists due to multi-site on Mercury/Pantheon. But I do want to lay the groundwork and get as much in place up front as I can.

I have been reading everything I can find(I'll include some of the links at the end of this post), which has answered many of my questions. But has also lead to a few more detailed new ones.

• Installing new VPS at Linode with Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid, php downgraded to 5.2), Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta)

1 - Starting assumptions:

1.01 -- I want php 5.2 and not Lucid's default 5.3 for compatibility on Drupal 6, Plus possibly one old drupal 5 site.
1.02 -- I want MySQL 5.1, but may evaluate MariaDB at some point in the future.
1.03 -- VPS will be at Linode and 1 gig(1024meg) of RAM
1.04 -- Mercury/Pantheon 1.0 is current stable but 1.1 is late? beta. (Not sure how close to release, but sounds kinda close so hopefully reasonably stable)
http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=353 <-- Mercury/Pantheon(1.0) 400+ deployed but 100 still active
http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=701 <-- for Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta) only 6 deployed and zero still active ?
http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268 <-- Step-by-step: Installing Project Mercury 1.1 (Beta) on Ubuntu Lucid
1.05 -- Aegir 0.3 is current stable, but 0.4 alpha9 is most current development release. alpha 10 coming shortly due to bug found
1.06 -- Following items will require extra handling beyond the base installs
1.06.1 -- switch from php 5.3 down to php 5.2
1.06.2 -- setup of global.inc to include additional info in settings.php(can't edit direct since aegir refreshes settings.php file) to handle multi-site caching for APC and memcache?
# Key Prefix: edit this for multisite use.
$conf['memcache_key_prefix'] = 'site2';
using a variable containing site name/path? has been mentioned for prefix(trying to find msg again)
-1.07 -- modification of Apache Solr config? to handle multi-sites.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/77883
http://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2010/06/26/multi-core-apache-solr-ubunt...
This may also come in handy, but still investigating.
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/may/27/searchlight-views-driven-app...

2 - Some outstanding questions / OK maybe average questions, but still looking for answers :-)

2.01 - As part of the Aegir install it says to make sure that certain basic packages are in place prior to running the install script. Will the Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta) install be taking carte of any of these requirement? If not in place, I'm thinking hat rerunning the install won't cause problems except for maybe php(since 5.3 > 5.2)
2.02 - Does the Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta) install also down grade php from 5.3 to 5.2 on Ubuntu Lucid? I am assuming that it doesn't and that I will be handling that manually. I ask, because a single post implied that Mercury install took care of this, but that might have only been on Amazon AMI's
2.03 - I know that some variation of Aegir and Mercury/Pantheon have been run together, but was wondering if anyone has the specific combination of Mercury/Pantheon(1.1 beta) and Aegir 0.4 alpha 9? Even better if they are running it at Linode.
2.04 - Any other reasons to do a 64bit server vs a 32 bit one beyond the ability to access over 4 gig of RAM? Any downsides for 64bit over 32 bit? I considering going for the 64 bit in case project takes off and I need the RAM.
2.05 - Cacherouter ( http://drupal.org/project/cacherouter ) I've seen a comments that says it works out of the box with APC+Aegir, anyone know if it can handle memcached+Aegir also? Don't see anything in it's issue queue
2.06 - I'm guessing that the non-stackscript method is probably the best choice for installing Mercury/Pantheon. http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268

3 - Some misc links other may find usefull:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/72488 <-- Instructions for setting up multi-site on Mercury
http://groups.drupal.org/node/55033 <-- Mercury + Aegir
http://groups.drupal.org/node/55393 <-- Says has bugs that cause Aegir failure(has it been fixed?) / Install Aegir In Mercury - New Installation (also oriented towards Amazon EC2 and AMIs)
http://groups.drupal.org/node/73463 <-- Proper way to make Cacherouter-APC, Boost work with Aegir
http://groups.drupal.org/node/84639 <-- Aegir integration with Pantheon/Mercury (Maybe someday ...)
http://groups.drupal.org/node/58838 <-- Mercury Multisite?
http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268 <-- Step-by-step: Installing Project Mercury 1.1 (Beta) on Ubuntu Lucid
http://groups.drupal.org/node/70258 <-- Mercury's Template system for BCFG2
http://drupal.org/node/500088#comment-2457592 < -- allow user-defined settings.php overrides / global.inc
http://drupal.org/node/500088#comment-2074578 < -- site specific if file to be included exists.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/50408 <-- Step-by-step: Setting up Project Mercury 1.0 (Varnish, Apache, APC, Memcached and Solr) using BCFG2
http://groups.drupal.org/node/84074 < -- Barracuda Aegir with Nginx Edition 0.4-alpha9-A9.F (Lucid, Karmic and Lenny compatible)

Any info/feedback appreciated.
Paul