During DrupalCon back in April, I got interviewed by Kent from Lullabot for his Drupal Voices podcast series.

I recently led a live DrupalDojo webinar on the Aegir hosting system.

The session was designed in lieu of potentially presenting a future series of Aegir-related dojo sessions that progress in terms of topic complexity (i.e beginner through to expert).

For this reason, the session was largely an introduction to the system and how to use it, with some 'under the hood' peeks where possible for those users who are comfortable with the terminology and process already.

The Aegir project has seen vigorous development leading up to, during and after DrupalCon San Francisco April 2010.

Unfortunately due to the volcano ash from Iceland, lead developer and Aegir author Adrian Rossouw got marooned in Frankfurt and was unable to join the rest of the team at Moscone.

Here's a screencast to guide you through the steps involved in installing our latest Aegir release, 0.4 alpha5 on a fresh Debian Lenny virtual server with no other prior configurations.

Warning: this is a very boring screencast, for two reasons:

1) You really can follow the instructions / copy and paste the commands from the INSTALL.txt with barely any changes required. Seriously. That's what I did.

2) I sound exactly like a zombie doing his tax return. Hey, it's 1am.

Many Aegir users ask whether there is a way to schedule backups of all sites provisioned in Aegir. Currently at the time of writing, no such scheduling exists within Aegir itself, since we have a few design decisions to work out (such as where to store the backups, especially when multi-server comes in!)

For the meantime, here's a crude little shell script that might help you. You should execute it as the aegir user.