undertakingyou

I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, and since I couldn’t sleep tonight at 11:00 pm, and like so many others my best writing happens when I am tired and not thinking straight, here it goes.

I have written about stackable before here and here. The VPS-like solution offered by xmission. I am actually thinking of removing my colo and just using stackable for other things. They really do offer simple, no hassle but lots of control hosting here.

I wanted to highlight a couple of features if you are holding out. They now offer the DNS manager. It really is a simple yet powerful DNS tool available to any stackable customer. Also, you can do DNS for any domain that you have control over, not just the ones hosted on stackable.

Other useful tools include the IP Manager, which allows you to look at all the IP’s that you have. In addition, it will point out when you have IP problems or DNS conflicts, which has proven very useful.

An SSL Manager, for you know, SSL certificates that you have. It has signing requests, and certificates already signed.

And lastly in the new and improved tools FTP User management. Very handy for those that need to offer different or temporary FTP users.

Now, I want to emphasize what stackable is and what it is not. It is not a colo server, it is not a VPS. It is VPS-like. You are given a virtual machine that you do NOT have root access on. But you can host sites and control the virtual machine through the ‘dashboard’, a custom built web interface for Virtual Machine control. Currently stackable offers PHP and MySQL. But they do have plans to offer other hosted languages as well.

I really have to hand it to the guys at stackable. This really is as easy as it gets with web hosting.

I have been using VirtualBox to have a windows install somewhere. It is the bane of those that have to administer Windows only applications. Such is my fate with a web application that must run on IIS and has VBScript so I can only get to it with IE. This is a rant for another day.

The real point is that my Windows XP install would not for the life of me run normally. It would work, but every 4 seconds or so it would freeze up for 2 or 3 seconds and then resume. It was to the point of being unusable. It would really tick me off. Well after some very frustrating google searching I found this post. The short of it is that if you use ubuntu Karmic as a host you will probably have this problem. Karmic has changed the kernel that somehow messed with the XP VM and makes it not work. The solution, install the linux-rt kernel. It works like a charm.

I know that I have harped on how much I enjoy this hosting solution. I have really enjoyed using the versions feature lately with my own stuff and as a sandbox for others as I work on their website.

But rather than me just going on and on let me point you to my friend Emily Higbee’s article on it.

At the Utah PHP Users group meeting on Thursday night Mike Place presented on Stackable. I wrote a post on Stackable a couple of weeks ago. At tonights meeting not only did MP give a great overview of what Stackable is and gave out some really fun deadline dice, but he also talked about some new features that I think are pretty exciting.

First, my favorite new feature to be added in the next 6 to 8 weeks: DNS. Yep, stackable will have dns with full control through the dashboard. This will be a great improvement and super useful feature.

Second, integration of SVN, so you can have commits to your project that will push onto your webserver. When you are ready to deploy push that branch live using stackable’s simple versions feature and start a new branch for development. Super cool.

Last to talk about DJANGO stacks coming soon. MP wouldn’t give a for sure date but it is in active development. I don’t use django, but if you do you should be happy.

There were some other things. ROR stacks in the future. A resellers option in the future also. Possibilities of supporting different databases as well. Really, the guys at Stackable are willing to listen to ideas of what can be done to make this the best hosting solution ever. You should check it out.

As part of my new business adventures I bought several domains. Then came the thought of hosting several domains and that was a nightmare. Not because it is hard but for the most part I usually encourage people just to use some generic hosting through xmission, godaddy or whoever-it-is today dot com. But I didn’t want to have several hosting accounts out there for my own stuff.

Also, as a system administrator I want to have full and granular control of what is going on. This made me think that I either need to have a colo-ed server of some kind, or a VPS. This would give me great control, and I could have as many websites on the machine as I want to, or until the server crashes. Whichever comes first.

Now, I like to support local businesses, especially ones that support open source because that is just who I am. After some looking around and finding that my budget would curtail things like colo-ing a server, I caught wind of stackable.com. A subsidiary of xmission that is offering a cloud computing solution something similar to Amazon EC2.

So, what is Stackable. Stackable is cloud computing offering a sort of managed hosting option. You the consumer can set up as many ‘containers’ (servers) you would like to pay for in your account. Each container is running CentOS 5 and you get shell and ftp access to the container itself.

Once you have your containers set up you can set up sites. When you set up a site using the dashboard it creates the appropriate directory structure in your container home folder for the doc_root, creates the appropriate virtual host files for apache and reloads the httpd service.

Lastly, you can create as many databases as you need for your applications. These are held on different xmission servers and you are given all the information that you will need to use the database.

Once you have all your pieces in place you are ready to point your DNS to your site ‘DNS Address’ and away you go. It works well. You are using it right now

So the good: It is quite reasonably priced and helps out a local Utah business. It is designed to let you quickly set up a site and get back to what you need to do. The dashboard is actually quite easy to navigate, and you are given a section to restart, stop, start services on your server as needed. The support staff for stackable is actually on the ball. They know what they are talking about and get back to you quickly. Very refreshing. They use the xmission data center which is quite nice (they will give you a tour, you should check it out). In addition to that all the containers are on servers using raid for drive redundancy and the container home folders are on some network attached storage that is backed up nightly. All that security at no effort to myself.

What is not good: To sign up for the service you have to actually request an invite. It is not at the point of ‘active’ deployment yet. While the hosting portion itself works fine there are some things missing. Many of these are outlined in stackable’s faq but I could share a few. It seems that it is only set up at this point to support PHP, MySQL, and Apache. You get your lamp stack and can go on your way. If your site is running Ruby on Rails, Python or Django, etc. you will have to wait, they will implement that in the future. Also, there is no root access. At first, I thought this was a holdup, but after thinking about it for a while, I can do most of my admin stuff from the web-dashboard. So for me, this is no longer a show stopper but it could be for some as you don’t have full control. Lastly, there is extremely poor documentation. For example, I pointed the DNS of my site to the container IP address and was not getting anything served out as webpages. What I needed to do was point my DNS to the ‘DNS Address’ of the ‘site’. Not documented. Had to use the help email.

All in all I am so far very happy with stackable.com and look forward to seeing the project mature. Cudos to xmission.

So, I have tried virutal box for a week, and have found some frustrations that I never had with VMWare. To start, I can’t get Fedora 7 to go full screen for my life. No matter how hard I try, it is stuck at 1024 X 768. And with my 1600 X 1200 native screen resolution that is really annoying.
Next I can not get VirtualBox to install openSUSE for my anything! It would go along and then when it tried to check the network device it would cough and die. I could log in as root, where I created my user account, and then I could go like normal. Then I find that if I tell it to download updates and walk away, the VM would just crash and VirtualBox would say that it is aborted.
So, after some frustration I installed VMWare Server again. None of the afforementioned issues. I haven’t had a chance to do side by side startup times. but I am wondering if VMWare has some small edge with me now.
Soon I will post my thoughts on Fedora Moonshine just before I try out Werewolf.
Also coming, a review of openSUSE 10.3

I have been recently interested in virtualization as a way to test out other distros (and for those times when windows must be used). Today I think rounds out a lot of my journey with virtualization. I have used vmware-server in the past, but I had heard a lot of talk about other options. First thing after work today I try to set up KVM with QEMU. I was very disappointed that my machine doesn’t support KVM, effectively killing that trial. I decided to try VirtualBox at the prodding of some friends. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised.

VMware took three or ten tries to get fedora 7 “moonshine” up and running. I was frustrated that to finally get it going I had to fight the machine like a dog for a chew toy. With virtualbox it saw everything right away and installed Moonshine in a flash. It seems to run faster than vmware-server did also.

On the other hand, vmware-server had some pluses over vbox. One, I can’t seem to get full resolution with vbox but, I was able to with some ease in vmware. Also, vbox doesn’t do bridged connections for your Ethernet, it does NAT. And so the world can’t get back to you without some work. If you are like me though and are not setting up a server that needs to have incoming connections you are good to go.

Pluses for vbox: Faster, stores vm’s in home directory by default, can also hook to other system dirs as a “shared directory” (vmware-server has no shared folder or drag-n-drop support), easier to set up than vmware-server, easier “bios” configuration than vmware-server.

Pluses for vmware: I actually like the interface better, it has bridged network so the world can get back.

There are still other options that I haven’t tried, parrelles, xen, vmware-desktop (that I am not willing to pay $190 for). But for a quick to set up fast virtualization, vbox is the winner.