eddiem
05-26-2008, 06:03 PM
Hi All,
After all the hassle in getting signed up (posted in another thread) setting up my VPS did not go smoothly.
I've used shared hosting and cpanel for many years but never managed a server. I've used linux before at a console and scripting level but I'm pretty rusty and make no claims to be good at it.
I prefer not to learn more than I have too.
My primary aim for the VPS is to host a tikiwiki site. This site was getting a lot of traffic and I was becoming unwanted on my shared account. Most of the recent traffic was actually robots but I do get large real spikes on occasion. The site hosts some free win-ce programs (not mine) and new releases can means 10K downloads in a few days. Only getting 80 visits a day now.
I've been posting the saga on the wiki so you may want to check that out yourself.
http://nerdipedia.com/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=83
A quick summary is -
I moved a test wiki fairly easily and had nerdipedia.com moved on the first day.
We (I have one other user) were getting lots of failures.
After boot things would work but after a while using the hosting panel and cpanel we'd start to get errors.
This is a common sight - [a fatal error or timeout occurred while processing this directive]
Eventually things would lock up. A jag tech said we were running out of memory.
In practice the system usually restarts enough services to serve web-pages and give SSH access (to reboot) but not always enough to reboot via the panel.
----------
I was having trouble understanding the DNS setup.
I had assume the name servers had be set up by jag.
It turns out we have a recycled VPS and the previous owner's NS settings were there.
The instructions saying our NS was NS1.nerdpedia.com etc were wrong.
To top it off I couldn't delete the old NSs because they were registered with icann.
Support fix it - I still don't have my NS working properly but managed to "borrow" a name server to keep the site up.
When I finally learned to check our ram with "free" I discovered we don't have the 256M I ordered.
Strangely "free" also showed a fair bit of free memory even when things are failing.
Support has been slow in acknowledging/fixing the ram issue.
-----------
Last night I couldn't upload images/files to the wiki.
Somehow the permissions had changed on the directories.
I hadn't touch them so I don't know how this happened.
While trying to fix this the server starting getting errors.
This turned out the be permissions on the public-html directory had changed - I hadn't touched this either.
In the process of finding the errors in the error log I learned that the log goes back to last august.
I had assumed our VPS would be a new account but appears to be at least 10 months old.
I hope they at least did a clean OS install before handing me the account.
Eddie,
After all the hassle in getting signed up (posted in another thread) setting up my VPS did not go smoothly.
I've used shared hosting and cpanel for many years but never managed a server. I've used linux before at a console and scripting level but I'm pretty rusty and make no claims to be good at it.
I prefer not to learn more than I have too.
My primary aim for the VPS is to host a tikiwiki site. This site was getting a lot of traffic and I was becoming unwanted on my shared account. Most of the recent traffic was actually robots but I do get large real spikes on occasion. The site hosts some free win-ce programs (not mine) and new releases can means 10K downloads in a few days. Only getting 80 visits a day now.
I've been posting the saga on the wiki so you may want to check that out yourself.
http://nerdipedia.com/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=83
A quick summary is -
I moved a test wiki fairly easily and had nerdipedia.com moved on the first day.
We (I have one other user) were getting lots of failures.
After boot things would work but after a while using the hosting panel and cpanel we'd start to get errors.
This is a common sight - [a fatal error or timeout occurred while processing this directive]
Eventually things would lock up. A jag tech said we were running out of memory.
In practice the system usually restarts enough services to serve web-pages and give SSH access (to reboot) but not always enough to reboot via the panel.
----------
I was having trouble understanding the DNS setup.
I had assume the name servers had be set up by jag.
It turns out we have a recycled VPS and the previous owner's NS settings were there.
The instructions saying our NS was NS1.nerdpedia.com etc were wrong.
To top it off I couldn't delete the old NSs because they were registered with icann.
Support fix it - I still don't have my NS working properly but managed to "borrow" a name server to keep the site up.
When I finally learned to check our ram with "free" I discovered we don't have the 256M I ordered.
Strangely "free" also showed a fair bit of free memory even when things are failing.
Support has been slow in acknowledging/fixing the ram issue.
-----------
Last night I couldn't upload images/files to the wiki.
Somehow the permissions had changed on the directories.
I hadn't touch them so I don't know how this happened.
While trying to fix this the server starting getting errors.
This turned out the be permissions on the public-html directory had changed - I hadn't touched this either.
In the process of finding the errors in the error log I learned that the log goes back to last august.
I had assumed our VPS would be a new account but appears to be at least 10 months old.
I hope they at least did a clean OS install before handing me the account.
Eddie,