Advice for the IT crowd

[poadeleted21]

when you see the letters hostgator written anywhere. RUN!!!!!

Unless you just enjoy getting the reply "We are aware of the issue, anything else?" or your blood pressure is running a little low.

I don't have a budget VPS I have one of their higher end offerings.

my VPS is down indefinitely.... AGAIN with no explanation as to why. I contacted first level support knowing I would get the above reply. My ticket stated that my VPS was unreachable. He asked me "how do you manage your vps without cpanel?" I replied ssh, he then asked me for my root password, I said get to the password prompt and then talk to me about it. Mystified, he had no clue.

Linode account set up hostgator will be shut off tomorrow this is like the 11th time in 6 months the VPS just disappeared. I understand that doo doo happens with servers but if you can't tell me what's wrong, what you're doing to fix it and a little reassurance (even if it's a lie) that it won't happen again....

 

[murphey]

hostgator, ipower, yada yada yada....they're all the same low-budget with customer support to match.

my favorite question from ipower, "why on earth would you ever want to change the permissions on a file?"

 

[poadeleted21]

hostgator, ipower, yada yada yada....they're all the same low-budget with customer support to match.

my favorite question from ipower, "why on earth would you ever want to change the permissions on a file?"

Once the boot-loader takes over, I got it from there. When the power's off and the server is in TX and I'm in MT I'm at their mercy.... NO MORE!!

 

[DaleB]

I switched from GoDaddy to Linode about a month ago. So far, so good. And it's $10 a month cheaper, AND I can use their web site without having to wade through neck-deep upsell ads to do what I want. Win all around for Linode (so far).

 

[poadeleted21]

I switched from GoDaddy to Linode about a month ago. So far, so good. And it's $10 a month cheaper, AND I can use their web site without having to wade through neck-deep upsell ads to do what I want. Win all around for Linode (so far).

If you were around for my last rant, the owner of linode is a fellow pilot too. Piper IIRC so we know his priorities are in the right spot.

 

[CJones]

I've heard tons of good reviews for Linode. I'm still on Hostgator's shared account, but that's only running an out-of-service personal site and my wife's blog and never had any problem with it.

 

[poadeleted21]

I've heard tons of good reviews for Linode. I'm still on Hostgator's shared account, but that's only running an out-of-service personal site and my wife's blog and never had any problem with it.

Oh Lord Shared Hosting that's what got me into this immediate need for VPS and hostgator was 1st in the search engine.

Shared hosting is like a gym membership, they hope you don't use it and if you do you'll find there's several sweaty lunks already there hogging up all the good equipment.

 

[zaitcev]

I went to Linode from - of all places! - Rackspace, where I camped out for the cheap traffic to CloudFiles. The only reason for the switch was that Linode offered IPv6, while Rackspace were dragging their feet (still do). Linode seems riding high these days. It actually makes me concerned: if anything happens to them, half of the Internet is gone.

 

[DaleB]

If you were around for my last rant, the owner of linode is a fellow pilot too. Piper IIRC so we know his priorities are in the right spot.

Actually, it was your last rant that made me aware of them, and the fct that the owner is a pilot did play a (small) part in my decision. A much bigger part is, I like their style. If I can't have my own box parked on a fat pipe somewhere (and I can't justify the cost for that), just give me a no-BS VM with decent access tools, and stay the hell out of my way until I need something from you. Linode seems to do exactly that.

 

[poadeleted21]

I went to Linode from - of all places! - Rackspace, where I camped out for the cheap traffic to CloudFiles. The only reason for the switch was that Linode offered IPv6, while Rackspace were dragging their feet (still do). Linode seems riding high these days. It actually makes me concerned: if anything happens to them, half of the Internet is gone.

I had a rackspace account but their bandwidth was expensive, it would have been find had the site traffic stayed the same but I'm hoping for more and it would not have scaled well in the pocketbook department.

 

[poadeleted21]

Actually, it was your last rant that made me aware of them, and the fct that the owner is a pilot did play a (small) part in my decision. A much bigger part is, I like their style. If I can't have my own box parked on a fat pipe somewhere (and I can't justify the cost for that), just give me a no-BS VM with decent access tools, and stay the hell out of my way until I need something from you. Linode seems to do exactly that.

It's working good, I have it u p and running now trying to figure out how to change the DNS over to my new DNS server I just set up. I hate swapping DNS i do it so infrequently I have to relearn it every time.

 

[dmspilot]

when you see the letters hostgator written anywhere. RUN!!!!!

Unless you just enjoy getting the reply "We are aware of the issue, anything else?" or your blood pressure is running a little low.

I don't have a budget VPS I have one of their higher end offerings.

my VPS is down indefinitely.... AGAIN with no explanation as to why. I contacted first level support knowing I would get the above reply. My ticket stated that my VPS was unreachable. He asked me "how do you manage your vps without cpanel?" I replied ssh, he then asked me for my root password, I said get to the password prompt and then talk to me about it. Mystified, he had no clue.

Linode account set up hostgator will be shut off tomorrow this is like the 11th time in 6 months the VPS just disappeared. I understand that doo doo happens with servers but if you can't tell me what's wrong, what you're doing to fix it and a little reassurance (even if it's a lie) that it won't happen again....

Are Hostgator VPSes Xen-based or VZ based? Xen is great; the latter should be taken off the market IMO.

Hostgator is generally well-liked for shared hosting for simple web sites. But I would never get a VPS or dedicated server from a company that made their name in shared.

Rackspace and Linode are both good choices; their pricing structures are quite a bit different from each other so which is better will depend on your use-case.

BTW RackspaceCloud gives you free DNS services so you don't have to run BIND. Dunno if Linode does but it's very convenient.

 

[poadeleted21]

Are Hostgator VPSes Xen-based or VZ based? Xen is great; the latter should be taken off the market IMO.

Hostgator is generally well-liked for shared hosting for simple web sites. But I would never get a VPS or dedicated server from a company that made their name in shared.

Rackspace and Linode are both good choices; their pricing structures are quite a bit different from each other so which is better will depend on your use-case.

BTW RackspaceCloud gives you free DNS services so you don't have to run BIND. Dunno if Linode does but it's very convenient.

linode won on my account because processor usage is generally very low but piperforum.com gets over 1 millon hits a year although it's pretty slim on images etc... it's still a lot of data moving across the wires and the bandwidth is a la carte with rackspace. Llinode gives plenty up front with room to grow for a nominal fee. With linode you can run bind or not or "kind of". You can slave the linode nameservers to your friendly bind install and wah-lah you're free to edit zone files in vim (no there isn't another acceptable text editor) and have as much fun as you can stand and just push it to the linode dns servers, no need to beg your registrar to update your nameserver IP addreses.

 

[CJones]

Oh Lord Shared Hosting that's what got me into this immediate need for VPS and hostgator was 1st in the search engine.

Shared hosting is like a gym membership, they hope you don't use it and if you do you'll find there's several sweaty lunks already there hogging up all the good equipment.

Yeah.. I'm still on shared hosting. <cue Price is Right 'wuh wuh wuh' music> I haven't come up with a good web idea that is big enough for me to need the consistency of a VPS. Someday...

I will say this, though - HostGator shared hosting has been running my wife's WordPress based commercial blog for almost a year now with no reported downtimes. And trust me, if it went down, my wife would let me know IMMEDIATELY.

 

[denverpilot]

I spent an hour or so making a friend's Linux virtual server do what he promised his soccer league he could do to "save them money", last weekend.

If he weren't a really good friend I would have asked him if he calls his Doctor, Accountant, Lawyer, or anyone else up on weekends, asking them to do their professional work for free.

Judging by the tiny amount of money he saved his soccer league per year, I'm guessing the budget was about $100 to pay for professional assistance.

But he's a really good friend and unlike any of those other professions, if you say "no", you might not get asked to visit for dinner again the next time you're in town.

It did, however, increase my hatred of sendmail another notch after I was 20 minutes into screwing around with something that's a one-line option in postfix. Should'a just ripped it off his machine and switched it out.

 

[poadeleted21]

I spent an hour or so making a friend's Linux virtual server do what he promised his soccer league he could do to "save them money", last weekend.

If he weren't a really good friend I would have asked him if he calls his Doctor, Accountant, Lawyer, or anyone else up on weekends, asking them to do their professional work for free.

Judging by the tiny amount of money he saved his soccer league per year, I'm guessing the budget was about $100 to pay for professional assistance.

But he's a really good friend and unlike any of those other professions, if you say "no", you might not get asked to visit for dinner again the next time you're in town.

It did, however, increase my hatred of sendmail another notch after I was 20 minutes into screwing around with something that's a one-line option in postfix. Should'a just ripped it off his machine and switched it out.

Guess it's all what you're used to, been tweaking senmail.cf for years and it's a piece-o-cake. Any software that requires the use of "make" to tweak configuration is a win in my book . I have a deer in headlights look on my face when tasked with postfix. I still hate the dirty nasty syntax of iptables and Lucky for me there was a nice kernel bug in CentOS 6 that kept named from starting. I love hacking init.d scripts to work around kernel bugs.

 

[jesse]

I spent an hour or so making a friend's Linux virtual server do what he promised his soccer league he could do to "save them money", last weekend.

If he weren't a really good friend I would have asked him if he calls his Doctor, Accountant, Lawyer, or anyone else up on weekends, asking them to do their professional work for free.

Judging by the tiny amount of money he saved his soccer league per year, I'm guessing the budget was about $100 to pay for professional assistance.

But he's a really good friend and unlike any of those other professions, if you say "no", you might not get asked to visit for dinner again the next time you're in town.

It did, however, increase my hatred of sendmail another notch after I was 20 minutes into screwing around with something that's a one-line option in postfix. Should'a just ripped it off his machine and switched it out.

+1. Sendmail is awful.

I host something like 20,000 e-mail accounts on a stack I built using Postfix, Dovecot, amavisd, roundcube, and openldap. All managed through a software package I wrote that has a gui and an api. Also does DNS.

 

[poadeleted21]

+1. Sendmail is awful.

I host something like 20,000 e-mail accounts on a stack I built using Postfix, Dovecot, amavisd, roundcube, and openldap. All managed through a software package I wrote that has a gui and an api. Also does DNS.

Ahh... It's not awful once you have about .. oh lemme see, 15 years of dealing with it. I have no idea how to setup and use postfix. I was from Zero to Sendmail in about 4 minutes, it would have taken me that long to figure out how to get postfix to accept traffic from everywhere. You want to talk about awful, try hooking Exchange to the Internet without a Unix machine sitting in front of it, Back in the day ALL exchange accounts and their associated email used to be stored in ONE FILE. so if one mail box went a little screwy or the file got written to a bad block, the entire server failed. There were companies making a decent living at doing nothing but fixing exchange files. Just to make it more fun the format was cryptic and proprietary with ZERO specifications published.

 

[jesse]

Ahh... It's not awful once you have about .. oh lemme see, 15 years of dealing with it.

Just because you're good at it - doesn't mean it's not inherently awful from the ground up. Named is pretty awful too. I like PowerDNS which couples nicely with a SQL backend.

I can get Postfix up and doing things in a few minutes. But I'm no expert at it either. I push a config change via Puppet maybe twice a year.

 

[poadeleted21]

Just because you're good at it - doesn't mean it's not inherently awful from the ground up. Named is pretty awful too. I like PowerDNS which couples nicely with a SQL backend.

I can get Postfix up and doing things in a few minutes. But I'm no expert at it either. I push a config change via Puppet maybe twice a year.

Just because you're not good at it doesn't mean it's inherently awful

 

[DaleB]

Just because you're not good at it doesn't mean it's inherently awful

Hell, I was good at it, and it's definitely awful. I spent a long time cracking whips at Sendmail, and switching to Postfix took me all of about 2 hours. Half of that was wondering if it could really be THAT easy. I'm a convert... but hey whatever works for ya. I do still use BIND... for the number of host records I have to manage, it's easier and faster than anything that needs a SQL back end.

Now, you want something fun to play with? Asterisk! I'm running that here for my work and sideline business phone service -- one toll free and two other numbers, and ALL of it together costs me less than $10 a month. I'm switching the home phone to go through the Asterisk box, which now does some very powerful anti-telemerketer screening and blacklisting. Plus we get nice little things like calls delivered to my cell phone if I'm not there to answer the one on my desk, voicemails to my email box, automatic FAX receive and delivery via email and so on.

 

[poadeleted21]

Hell, I was good at it, and it's definitely awful. I spent a long time cracking whips at Sendmail, and switching to Postfix took me all of about 2 hours. Half of that was wondering if it could really be THAT easy. I'm a convert... but hey whatever works for ya. I do still use BIND... for the number of host records I have to manage, it's easier and faster than anything that needs a SQL back end.

Now, you want something fun to play with? Asterisk! I'm running that here for my work and sideline business phone service -- one toll free and two other numbers, and ALL of it together costs me less than $10 a month. I'm switching the home phone to go through the Asterisk box, which now does some very powerful anti-telemerketer screening and blacklisting. Plus we get nice little things like calls delivered to my cell phone if I'm not there to answer the one on my desk, voicemails to my email box, automatic FAX receive and delivery via email and so on.

I'm a coder by trade, messing with software and configuration isn't even on my long list of things to do. I do have to pretend to be a sysadmin when designing new systems from a blank sheet of paper. Awful in my opinion means what happens after it's configured and up and running. I've had zero issues in 15 years of setting up sendmail installs. As Ron Popell would say "Set it and forget it". I have a baseline install I use and just tweak it as needed, postfix might be the best thing since sliced bread but I haven't bothered to learn much about it, I did set it up once on a Sophos server that was relaying to some exchange boxes but that's about it.

 

[denverpilot]

Guess it's all what you're used to, been tweaking senmail.cf for years and it's a piece-o-cake. Any software that requires the use of "make" to tweak configuration is a win in my book .

Here's your fun then.

Block all e-mail outbound that has any other domain other than six defined domains (one is hosted on this server, five are not).

Now allow all e-mail inbound from those six domains also, regardless of what other domains are in the header envelope or otherwise.

Basically as long as it came FROM any of those six domains going in or out doesn't matter who else it's addressed to.

(This is a one-liner in postfix BTW.)

Sendmail does the one thing software shouldn't. Waste the sysadmin's time.

 

[zaitcev]

Block all e-mail outbound that has any other domain other than six defined domains (one is hosted on this server, five are not).

It's trivial in Sendmail with a milter, say a Perl script.

You guys are harping on the wrong thing wrt. Sendmail. It's awful because of its crusty architecture and not because many people don't know how to use it.

My first episode of hacking on Sendmail came some time in 1992, when 5.x and IDA Sendmail were in use. It taught me that freshly created objects must be completely initialized right away. Not sure if Eric Allman ever figured it out.

 

[denverpilot]

ROFL... "Trivial" equals a perl script Milter. Versus, turning on a well-tested feature with a one-line option.

Sendmail blows. I wish we weren't still using it on some Production machines.

On and for the record, we're using Milter-regex to tackle that "hypothetical" real-world problem. What a pain.

Perl? An HLL and overhead to tackle something that trivial? Really?

I bet there's a Milter-Java out there if you like high CPU utilization and wasted RAM.

 

[DaleB]

I tend to look at Postfix as the result of someone looking at Sendmail and saying, "Hey, you know what... this works, but if we knew then what we know now, we'd do it like this instead..."

I used to be a Sendmail guy, for a lot of years. I owned an ISP at one time, and got pretty good at doing stupid email tricks. I'm feeling much better now. And of course, Postfix, Sendmail, semaphore or a smoky fire and a blanket beat Exchange for anything connected to the 'net.

 

[rourkem]

and a blanket beat Exchange for anything connected to the 'net.

Good one on that.

 

[Sac Arrow]

I learned to program in Basic and Fortran, and then Turbo C, but I STILL wish Google translate would handle IT speak.