VPS.net

Being the good little customer that I am, I tend to try and keep an eye on what upstream are doing. To that end I've been keeping an eye on VPS.net; UK2.net's newest business venture. I'm one of the lucky 80 or so that have gotten into the beta, and I've got to say, I'm really impressed with what the guys have put together so far.

Basically what they're providing is a fault tolerant, brilliantly easy to use virtual server infrastructure, based on Linux and Xen. Unlike most other (more traditional) VPS providers you simply don't buy a VPS and then manage it, you actually buy "nodes" or "slices" (they're actually refered to as both terms in the web interface at present), which you then assign to various virtual servers in any fashion you want, with the ability to reassign at a later date should things change.

There are a few cool things about the whole setup:

  1. It's delightfully quick
  2. It's absolutely fanastically easy to use
  3. You can get console access direct through the web interface, along with all the other bits and bobs that you may need
  4. You have the option for live backups and restores - very nice, very quick considering its all LVM, and makes reverting any stupid changes very easy (such as rm -rf'ing your root partition)

I'd love to see how things fare as the product launches, and it gets busier, but so far I'd be pretty happy to convert my physical server to a virtual VPS.net instance, should the circumstances arise.

Party like it's 1234567890!

coolepochcountdown.com says it all really. I think I might party myself silly and persuade my non-geeky housemates to partake.

What will you be doing?

I'm all for documentation and howtos, but...

Does the world really need multiple tutorials and howtos, where the only difference is that the title says it affects different distros? Especially when those distros are closely related?

Specifically the one that set me off was seeing yet another PowerDNS item appear in the HowToForge feed. Thinking that bloglines was having trouble I went off to have a look, but sure enough there are at least 3 guides. One for Debian Etch, one for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and one for CentOS 5.2. Now I can sort of understand the one for CentOS to a point. HowToForge is potentially for a market that doesn't know that their package manager is yum, or apt (although if you're trying to setup a DNS server, I might dispute that you're not ready if you don't know this), or where that specific distro puts various config files. On that front its very useful not to clutter one big howto with lots of "and", "or"'s.

However, Debian and Ubuntu are pretty closely related, and from a quick scan I honestly can't see the difference between the instructions other than the title. Granted I don't know the back end behind HowToForge, or it's policies, but surely it's possible to assign something to multiple distros?

I'm not specifically having a go at the person writing these documents, and this is why I've not linked to the articles. These people do an exceptionally important job, one of which is largely thankless.

So I'd like to say thank you to all the documentation writers. But may you could make your lives a little easier?

Uptime monitoring, using Munin, on Linux

Since I didn't come across an existing plugin after a quick google, and nor is there one in the official Munin repository that works on my Debian installations, I thought I'd post my implementation. It's exceptionally simple, however it might save someone 10 seconds of research and coding in the future. #!/usr/bin/perl if ($ARGV[0] and $ARGV[0] eq "config") { print "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0\n"; print "graph_title Uptime in days\n"; print "graph_category system\n"; print "graph_vlabel uptime\n"; print "uptime.label days\n"; print "uptime.draw AREA\n"; exit 0; } $uptime = `uptime`; $uptime =~ /up (.*?) day/; $up = int($1); print "uptime.value $up\n";

Xen, Vyatta, Happy New Year

New Years eve the extra bits of hardware I needed for my Xen box arrived (cheapo motherboard for VMX (Intel VT-x in my case) and power supply). As you can imagine with a house full of people, and corresponding day of pain afterwards, it wasn't the best time to be faffing with setting it all up. However, a few days later and it's all there and working like a dream.

I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised and also taken back by a few things. I'm also a little disappointed about a few bits and bobs, but I'll get to that later.

Having tested Xen previously, and having got a book on it for quick reference, getting it set up was painless, quick and easy, once I'd upgraded my dom0 to Lenny to sort a few networking and Xen related issues. Whilst I maybe a glutton for punishment for running without a GUI, I actually found setting up both Linux and Windows virtual machines painless from the command line.

One thing I was worried about, was the performance of the Windows machines I'd setup - they were awful. I really do mean it. It was like being back in front of the AMD box that we were using for virtual machine testing at my old job 3 or 4 years ago. Turns out that Windows XP/2003 and the Xen ACPI implementation don't quite play nicely and it's a case of making Window use the "standard pc" "drivers". Once I'd done this it was a hell of a lot better.

Continuing on the subject I was also a little apprehensive of using LVM2 in my setup, as last time I'd used it I'd ended up with mangled data. Since it's now been quite a while since that happened (years now), the fact that it's very widely used, and on mention from Andy that he'd been using it at work for super secret projects, I went for it again. Happily there's been no problems and the disk performance of the domU's is excellent.

Xen has also given me my first real opportunity to use and play with Vyatta, a fully pre-packaged, commercially supported, open source alternative to Cisco, Juniper, etc. It's actually pretty sweet, it must be said. I like the JunOS-like interface for setting it up, and how the config needs to be saved and commited, and how it's all accessible from the command line or web-GUI (if you're that sort of person). If you're already using your own rolled Linux boxes as routers, then you might not beable to see the point behind Vyatta, and I must admit before trying it I was one of those people. However, it's simply that it's all there already, with support should you need it - which in the real world can sometimes be very useful (as I'm sure everyone knows, since people like Redhat, Canonical, IBM, etc. exist and thrive). As time goes on I hope to not only use it in testing, but also for creating a quarantined portion of my personal network here, and to connect the other "main house" network. Hopefully that'll work out nicely, and if I does I may well end up using Vyatta on my next externally hosted server (which may end up being setup in a xen-hosting style - let me know if you maybe interested!).

The only shame with the Vyatta system, is the price of the hardware appliances from the commercial company. In comparison with Cisco's offering they are cheaper, but when you're looking at the small end of the companies we support at work, it's sometimes hard to justify using anything more than a really cheap Draytek or "worse".

So on the whole things are going well with Xen. Right now I don't know if I'd suggest a Windows 2008 Hyper-V Core server or Xen at work, next time it comes up - I suspect that I'd suggest different solutions for different circumstances (i.e. Hyper-V core for a Windows network with non-virtual AD boxes, and Xen for a colocation setup), but I can't really explain why when you exclude the obvious (such as managability in each situation). Food for thought perhaps

Apparently I need to say Happy New Year also.