iDude.org

As I’ve stated in the past, I’ve used a lot of different hosting providers and still have services remaining at most of them in some capacity.  With Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), I still have Cloud Files CDN service on standby in case I need it.   On 2-2-2010, I got an email notifying me that they have started offering Windows VPS for beta testing.  This is very exciting for me as it was one of the main features I wanted in Slicehost (which I still have 1 256mb Slice).

I setup a 512mb Windows 2003 Server to test. So far it seems to be quite excellent and fast. On speedtest.net, I got 67mb down, 27mb up. Not bad. It looks like the Windows 2003 Servers are running under XEN and the 2008 are most likely under Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  The new machine I setup did have SP2 on it, but was unpatched otherwise.  First thing I did was update everything.  The Windows Firewall is completely closed off by default at least.

I’m definitely going to keep testing it on Rackspace, but it would be nice to have one control panel and have them available via Slicehost.com as well. Even it if is an extension to the Slicehost control panel accessing Rackspace Cloud’s API. Better integration of the Slicehost offerings with the Rackspace Cloud services would help both entities since they should be one big happy family now. ;-)

I almost wish they would merge completely and integrate all the features from both sides of the house.  I’m sure that’ll happen in time as the old loyal power users move off to Linode (I moved 4 VPS to Linode) and it’ll have the least impact, churn-wise, if done smoothly.

My setup, if anyone is interested, is the following:

• 1×256mb Slicehost VPS running Cherokee/MySQL hosting ~25 sites.
• 3×360mb Linodes + 1×540mb Linode.  3 Servers are dedicated to individual customers, the other is for more sites I maintain.  Mostly running Cherokee/MySQL or Apache/MySQL.
• 1×1024mb CrystalTech VPS  running Windows 2008 for hosting email and websites for a number of customers
• 1×2048mb SingleHop Server running Windows 2003 for a few sites that wouldn’t work correctly under 2008 for a number of reasons.  This is an Intel ATOM based Server w/ 320gb HDD.  Not bad for $99.
• 2xMedia Temple Grid accounts for customer sites that need higher scalability.

If the Rackspace Windows VPS works out well, I’ll probably move the stuff off SingleHop since the Rackspace pricing is much better for me and SingleHop’s server is overkill memory and HDD wise for a few relatively basic websites and apps.

But I will say SingleHop’s services have been EXCELLENT in the year or so I’ve been using them.  No complaints at all, 0% downtime that I, or my monitoring software, have observed.  Good customer service and GREAT prices for dedicated servers.  I just don’t need dedicated servers at the moment.  If I did, SingleHop would be the place I’d go for both Linux and Windows dedicated.

CrystalTech has also been extremely reliable and fast, but the pricing is way too high, in my opinion.  $149 (including backups) for a 1024mb VPS w/ 60gb HDD when I can get a dedicated for not much more at SingleHop.

I’ll post more on Rackspace Cloud as I start using it more.

Cloud Computing, General, Microsoft, Review, Technical, Technology API, ATOM, CDN, cherokee, Cloud Files, CrystalTech, Hyper-V, Intel, MediaTemple, Microsoft, Mosso, MySQL, Rackspace, SingleHop, SliceHost, Windows Server 2003/8, XEN

Finally Apple’s tablet device has been officially announced. Steve Jobs just now got done with the presentation finished.

Here are some basic specs…
1/2 inch thin, 1.5 pounds, ~9.7 inch high rez display, 1ghz Apple A4 chip… New Apple chip that contain all the controllers. Accelerometer & compass, WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, speaker/mic and 30pin (standard) connector, 10 hours of battery life, 16 to 64gb Flash storage…

IPhone App compatible and can be scaled up to new screensize (pixel doubling)

More to come.

Apple, Cloud Computing, Gadgets, General, Software, Technical, Technology, Web Accelerometer, Apple, Apple A4 Chip, Bluetooth, compass, ipad, iPhone, islate, itablet, slate, steroids, tablet, WiFi

Over the past few years, I’ve become a big fan of Virtualization technologies like VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc. So much so that I moved ALL my hosting operations (20+ clients) to providers like Slicehost, Linode and CrystalTech for Hyper-V.

At home, I tend to use VirtualBox from Sun. It seems to be perform the best for both Windows and Linux, although I lost the ability to Bridge the VM’s NIC after upgrading to Windows 7.

At work, I initially used VMWare Server to setup numerous VMs for software testing and platform integration testing and other fancy stuff like that. I tried for about a year to get our IT staff to start using it, and FINALLY, they decided to go completely virtual running VBox on the Solaris platform. I still use VMWare Player for a couple VMs I have left from the past, but VBox is my favorite.

XEN I did not have so much experience with since I *thought* it was more of a IT Backendish type of Virtualization software and more arcane. Perhaps it was at one time.

But regardless of my misconception, I decided to download XenServer last night and install it on one of my spare boxes. XenServer is full virtualization “OS” that you install and all the guest machines are built inside it.

Won’t go through all the details, but the XenServer was a breeze to install, only asking basic questions and for the IP address of the server. It’s best to put it on a decent machine with lots of hard drive space and  plenty of RAM and processor power (Virtualization Extensions on the CPU is a BIG plus and allows you to run Windows VMs).

On older machines, like my old Pentium D (Dual Core) machine, it does not have processor virtualization extensions, so it was not able to run my Windows virtual machines.  The Linux (Ubuntu) servers worked just fine.

For Windows ones, I used a newer Quad Core Phenom box and put 4 Windows Server 2003’s on it by using the VMWare to XEN conversion program.  Was a little buggy getting it converted, but the Citrix XEN forums helped.

There are some sites out there you can google that have XEN ready images you can upload through the XenCenter software into the server and boot.

Overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the performance of XenServer and don’t think I’ll go back to desktop type virtualization solutions like VirtualBox and VMWare Server which has a crappy, buggy web interface (last time I used it) and requires you to already have an existing OS.  XenServer is OS+Virtualization solution all-in-one.

Cloud Computing, Cool Stuff, General, Linux, Microsoft, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu

I ran across a webserver called Cherokee a week or so ago while looking around for “light” alternatives to Apache on VPSes.  It looked pretty nice, so I downloaded it and compiled the latest version 0.99.9 and started it up.

The nicest thing, I think, about this server is the simple Web configuration UI (cherokee-admin).  When you start it, it generates a one time hashlike password that you then use to log into the web config.  From there, you can configure virtually (no pun intended) all aspects of the web server, including virtual hosts and many other settings.

The reason primarily for my use is serving up my static HTML sites and light PHP ones as well, light meaning minimal DB calls for things like contact form entry, single simple “SELECT * from where whatever = whatever” type querys with small recordsets and so on.  I moved about 20 of my customer sites to it and so far so good.  That is the level of confidence I had in Cherokee.  100% stable so far.

Compiling it from source may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it really isn’t that difficult.

Here’s how I did it from a new VPS.

apt-get install nano htop build-essential mysql-server php5 php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-mysql gettext

This installs nano (a simple text editor), htop (top on steroids), build-essential which is a meta package containing necessary packages to compile crap, mysql, PHP, a few extensions and gettext which the ./configure told me it needed and I’m surprised it wasn’t part of the build-essential.

If this is a fresh ubuntu build, you’ll probably get a locales error… Use this to correct.

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Download the latest cherokee source.

Untar it and enter the folder.

Now run these commands, modify the paths to your liking.  This runs the pre-compile config, makes then installs it, it then copies the init script to that folder and changes the permissions to allow it to execute.

./configure –localstatedir=/var –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –with-wwwroot=/var/www
make
make install
cp contrib/cherokee /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/cherokee

to Autostart the init script on boot… Run this…

update-rc.d -f cherokee defaults

That’s about it, read the documentation for specific information on features and have fun.  It is a VERY fast and light webserver that is very well suited for basic websites running on minimal memory VPSes.

Cloud Computing, General, Linux, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu, Web Apache, cherokee, HTML, Lighttpd, PHP, VPS, web daemon, web server

I posted a lot of posts earlier this summer about my debacle at Mosso which caused me to jump ship and switch my sites over to Slicehost…  

Lo and behold, Mosso buys my new provider… *sigh*…  Can’t get away! :-)

From talking to a few Slicehost guys in their chat, they stated that everything will stay pretty much the same or get better, which I hope it will, but I’m hoping the pricing stays the same or gets lower.

I guess I’ll just be crossing my fingers over the next few months as Slicehost merges into the larger company.  I’m hoping a lot of the features that have been requested by the users can come to fruition soon.

Here is my “wishlist”… (in no particular order)

1. Ability to backup Slices (cloud nodes) into the Mosso “cloud files” storage, which will allow better backup space utilization and ability to backup the slices offsite.
    
2. True “pay as you go” for the traditional Mosso shared hosting (Cloud sites)… Instead of $100/mo, do a $5/mo base + compute cycle charge or something along those lines.  I still have a few sites on the old Mosso that I wouldn’t mind keeping there (so I can have ASP/PHP hybrid hosting) as long as it’s reasonable.  
    
3. Windows 2003/8 Server Slices at the same price point and simplicity of management as the Linux slices.  This MAY be hard to do at an equivalent price due to Microsoft Licensing… But a 1GB+ 60gb+ for under $100 including snapshot backups would be sweet.
    
4. Keep the same “small company” feel for the people who have become accustomed to Slicehost the way it is today.
    
5. More diverse data center options to help with latency problems for people in Europe or Asia, ability to choose which datacenter you want a specific slice to reside and the ability to migrate between datacenters. (Rackspace/Mosso) has datacenters in San Antonio and Dallas, TX, Herndon, VA, three in England, and one in Hong Kong.  Both of Slicehost’s datacenters are in St. Louis, MO.
6. Backbone/Redundancy increases as Slices get “jacked” into the new data centers. 
7. A la carte access to features that are offered by Mosso and Rackspace such as cloud files and traditional Mosso ASP/PHP shared hosting.

These are all I can think of at the moment and I hope the best for the Slicehost crew.  IF things go bad, I’ll probably have to switch AGAIN to someplace like Linode, but for the time being, I’m still a loyal Slicehoster.

Cloud Computing, General, Linux, Microsoft, Software, Technical, Web