all:

I bought a personal linode server without the backup service.

All the data on it is totally personal and not that important. But for sure, I still don’t want them to be lost.

I want to know, without the backup service, which level of data protection should I expect?

Do they have in-place RAID or some other replication facilities for my data?

How do you think, without the backup service, the probability of a data loss would be?

Thanks.

Without backups, you have no data protection. RAID is for fault tolerance and availability in the event of a disk failure, not data protection. If you have a RAID 1 mirror and you accidentally delete or corrupt data, RAID isn’t going to protect you.

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I have a Ruby on Rails application and a couple of PHP projects nearly complete (all using MySQL) that I’d like to host on a Linode server and need some help with what I’d need to install and configure to do this. They would each have their own separate domain (probably with GoDaddy).

I’m not looking for a step-by-step instructions – more of a guide of what I should look into and research to be able to do this myself.
I’m not an expert at linux and this will be my first time using Linode and putting a Rails app into production so any advice is welcomed!

Thanks

Nginx, Apache and lighttpd have each a function for creating Virtual Hosts (vHosts).

With this functionality you can serve diefferent websites and webapps on one domain. The websites are identified by the Host header that is sent with every HTTP request.

I can only speak for myself but I really like nginx as a webserver so I can tell you what you need for nginx.

To add PHP to a nginx server you can use either the CGI version of PHP or PHP-FPM for easier configuration and management.

To add Rails apps you you should look into phusion passenger.

So for a little overview what you need:

• A suitable linux distribution (I like debian very much)
• A webserver (Apache, nginx, lighttpd, cherokee, …)
• PHP(-FPM)
• Ruby and Rails
• MySQL
• Decide for a DNS Provider (GoDaddy, Namecheap, … for renting the domain, Cloudflare for hosting it …)

Maybe you should try setting up a full webserver stack at home.

Another thing is to decide if you want to split your applications accross several servers. For example you can put MySQL on a single VPS. Then nginx can be run on a specific server and the apps on another.

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I use MySQL server on Debian GNU/Linux machine with 4 CPUs (Linode 4096) and there are performace issue on havy load (in the middle of the day) but machine is not overload only queries are slow.

What other database I can use that will use those 4 CPUs? I read that MySQL use only one. Is there SQL dababse or do I need to use NoSQL? Most queries are selects.

You are asking the wrong question. Find out what the performance bottleneck is instead of searching for a database server that makes better use of the resource you obviously have enough of (CPU power).

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Reference – http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/PV-GRUB#Building_Your_Own_Kernel

In order to work with Xen, a number of options that must be selected:

CONFIG_PARAVIRT_GUEST=y
CONFIG_XEN=y
CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y
CONFIG_PARAVIRT_CLOCK=y
CONFIG_XEN_BLKDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_XEN_NETDEV_FRONTEND=y
CONFIG_HVC_XEN=y
CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON=y
CONFIG_XEN_SCRUB_PAGES=y

Where exactly do I specify these configuration?

I have done these steps so far:-

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.3.3.tar.bz2
tar -xf linux-3.3.3.tar.bz2
cd linux-3.3.3
make menuconfig

make menuconfig brings me to the ncurses “GUI” but there are so many options I am completely lost….

Any suggestions how I should proceed?

The options in all caps are what gets written into the configuration file for the kernel you will be building (which make menuconfig generates).

There are two ways to edit it:

• Open the file and change/add the entries

• Browse to the relevant Xen options through the GUI, and guess their names from the all caps name. Yours will most likely be in Processor type and features --->. You can press the help key to see the option’s name and description so you can confirm that you are modifying/adding the correct options.

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Using a virtualized instance on linode.com, I don’t see where my bootloader is.

In the usual place where I would find grub, i.e. in /boot/grub/menu.lst, I don’t see any files or directories below the /boot path. It’s completely empty.

How do I find out where my bootloader is for my server instance on linode.com?

The boot loader is the code executed immediately after booting the system; part of it resides in the MBR (sector 1, cylinder 1 of the boot disk), but that is only 512 bytes in size so it usually chainloads a bigger bootloader elsewhere.

If you don’t have a /boot/grub (and the bootloader stages required to boot with grub), then you’re not using grub.

See if /etc/lilo.conf exists, instead.

man lilo

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We are going to move from Slicehost to Linode (the 1024MB ram) to host our website.
Now we have to take a distribution.

After discussing, the remaining candidates are:

• Arch Linux 2010.05
• Debian 5.0
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

The needs are simple: once set-up, we would like to forget about it, except for the needed updates, and dedicate to the website maintenance.
Could seem too simplistic, but the end result is running the website.

We would like to know what is the worst distro of these three. The less worst will be taken. ;-D

You need to take a look at a mirror and think about what you see there.

• If you need a rock-solid distribution and do not care about the latest version number of package foo, go with Debian.

• If you need a rock-solid(ish) distribution and you do care about the latest version number of package foo, go with Ubuntu Server.

• If you like to tinker around with your system and you do care about the latest version number of package foo, go with Arch Linux.

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I am ready to deploy my startup on the web so i would like to start small and get a VPS from linode as i see many good reviews and see how its going…

the thing is that on their website they state:

Transfer 200GB

for their Linode 512

does this include incoming and outgoing traffic?

what if i get some unexpected traffic due to ddos, i dont know what else and all my traffic gets gone too fast?

Linode don’t charge you for incoming traffic, only outgoing. http://blog.linode.com/2011/09/01/linode-reduces-transfer-pricing/

Linode are also supposed to be pretty reasonable about people going just a few GB over their allowance.

You’ll get an email in any case once you have used 80% of your allowance.

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I have a domain.com in godaddy.

I have created a new account in linode.

I want use my godaddy domain.com in my new account linode.

How can I do it? or Where can I find a guide for this?

Thank you

Once you have the Linode account set up and know its IP address, configure your domain (and any sub-domains like www that you want) to resolve to that IP address in GoDaddy’s domain manager.

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I have a VPS account from Linode.

I’ve installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with ‘LAMP Stack’ (StackScript).

How to upgrade the latest version of PHP version 5.3.10 from PHP 5.3.2?

I have even tried apt-get and it doesn’t update.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

apt can’t upgrade what it didn’t install. You would run into the same problem if you downloaded PHP directly from php.net and compiled it yourself… apt still wouldn’t upgrade it for you.

You can either use the upgrade path that Linode StackScripts provide. (I wasn’t able to find one by browsing their website.) or you can uninstall the StackScripts version of PHP and use apt to install the one you want.

I have no idea how StackScripts will handle not being in control of PHP. You may want to uninstall StackScripts entirely and install Apache, MySQL and PHP through apt instead.

If you have more Linode-specific questions, you may find more expertise over in their forums or IRC channel.

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I’ve been using Linode for over a year now, and, unlike some lesser-known VPS hosts I’ve used, I’ve never been required to shut down my VPS by Linode. The only restarts have been ones I’ve initiated.

How do they go for years on end without requiring restarts and with no downtime? Isn’t downtime inevitable when upgrading some parts of the host system? Do they simply perform as few updates as possible?

This isn’t meant to be a Linode-specific question; I am only using them as an example becuase I have experience with them.

Linode (and some other cloud vendors) use Xen full virtualization to provide services for you. These full virtualization stacks also allow the virtual machines to move from host-node to host-node live. One of the greatest side-effects of this is that they don’t have to take down customer VMs in order to patch a node. Just move all the VMs on that node else where, apply updates, reboot, migrate new ones in. Done.

What they don’t do for you is keep your VM OS patched. You have to do that yourself.

If they’ve engineered their system right (and they have), they can apply the same methods for things like network switch updates, storage system updates, and router reboots.

Linode (and others) are what’s known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors. They allow you to focus on only keeping the OS and application code maintained.

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