Yes, I will help you
Let's first establish what you need, as insight may not be the answer. Do you need a constantly updated block chain database, or to analyse a timestamped dump?
Also, do you require the full chain data, or only certain parts?
Finally, have you ensured that all dependencies are installed,
https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp details what you need.
Coinsolidation, after a week of all nighters and only 16 hours sleep, 1,00 gray hairs and 500 cuss words later, you have finally put light at the end of the old guys tunnel.
Yes i need full constantly updated chain data, data that i cannot get without getting banned from other services for querying too much from. Working on algorithms for measuring bitcoin adoption, truly lost or "dead" coins, hourly transaction volume, hourly price points and a ton of other stuff. I am an economics professor who has recently taken an interest in the economics of bitcoin after attending a conference that was held an hour from my home town.
In principal since i cannot have insight on the web server where all my other applications are installed, i am going to need to be able to access insight on the local network. would the standard Ubuntu 14.04 be able to be configured as such or do i need some sort of server environment. Ideally i would like to be able to code into my applications get XXXXXX data from 192.168.2.XX:3000/api/command.
Best to check this first... If you are doing API commands have you considered writing your applications to communicate with bitcoind's RPC API directly (or even via the command line)? You can also run programs every time a new block is received using the '-blocknotify=executable %s' configuration option, and maintain an index in the daemon of all transactions with the '-txindex' option. This would all be on a secure local bitcoin running on your server, with no duplication of data.
If you are certain that insight is the answer, and require that local visual browser part of it too, then the best way to proceed may be for me to do the process from scratch on a virtual machine and write the instructions for you to repeat.
Taking the latter option will require you to have a network accessible Ubuntu 14.04 machine. This could be a virtual machine inside VirtualBox or VMWare, or a physical machine on your network. You can run any version of Ubuntu, standard or server, one has the easy to use GUI and the other just a command line.
If you wish to proceed with the insight option, then I'd suggesting getting a Ubuntu machine setup, bitcoin downloaded, and to begin downloading the block chain.
As an alternative option if you can work over the internet rather than just local, then you could acquire a ubuntu VPS (digitalocean/aws) or cheap dedicated server and hand me the root access, I'd set it all up for you. If you are in the UK then I know a man who may be able to provide a good VPS for this quickly - I say UK as then network latency would be lower in communications to and from server.
Warm Regards,
Mark