[PLUG] UML

[AthlonRob]

On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 12:31, Jeff Schwaber wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 10:01, AthlonRob wrote:
>
> > A little bit, yes.  I've run them locally to play with and am leasing
> > one for $5/month in Canada.
> 
> What site is that?

http://vps.pigscanfly.ca

Overall, I would say it is worth the $5/month for the 16MB UML.  You get
your own IP address.  5GB/month over the Internet, which (in my
experience) hasn't been able to pull more than 30KB/sec down.

I'm running bind, postfix, openvpn, sshd, and apache on there.  I do
still have room to spare (about 6MB of RAM, believe it or not).  Getting
it set up, initially, was a bit of a pain.

After they set up the box, they email you your root password.  I can
tell you right now what it is, it doesn't seem to change.  You log in. 
If you reboot, you may hose their network setup, ending up with some
downtime; about five hours last time when I rebooted.

After I got the box, they had only given me about 200MB of space,
instead of a full gig.  When they resized it (on a live system, I'm
guessing), they hosed the filesystem and I had to start from scratch
again... no biggy, I had only put in about three hours on the thing.

Other issues... hmmm... their default image is Slackware, which is
great, but it is version 8.1, which is outdated a bit.  Several people
are running Debian on the system, I've seen.

They rebooted me twenty three hours ago for no apparent reason, I didn't
get any notice about it.  My init scripts work, though.  <g>

Before the reboot (I don't know about now, I haven't checked) there was
a significant security hole on the UML host.  It is significant enough
that you do *not* want to store anything on the box you wouldn't be okay
with fifty other people being able to see.

The real plus is it's only five bucks a month, and comes with a static
IP.  What I plan on using it for (they don't have reverse DNS working
yet) is a smart relay for postfix.  It's already working as backup DNS
just fine.  It's set up for backup MX, as well, but I haven't changed my
zone files to include it as an MX yet.

For five bucks a month, I can't complain too much... :-)

Rob