Cloud Computing and linode alternatives to a
normal dedicated machines
One of the dedicated servers's harddrive I maintain has
failed.
This alone has created many, many problems! It's serious
stuff
since this server is the main mail server and primary DNS.
I still am unsure what is gonna happen. The dedicated server
provider
responsible for the server
Valueweb 's
services complete suck! The situation became even more complex
with
the fact that valueweb has been bough by
hostway.com
The old server which hardrive has failed needs replacement and is
creating
serious problems within the company, however the management
solution
required for giving a go to the operation of replacement was
postponing
every time I tried to raise the question of the need for server
replacement.
Well today the worst has happened. I was woken up by my gsm
beepings just
to realize there are 20 smses notifying me that the server is
inaccessible.
That happened around 5:30 in the morning! Shit what a miserable
life, I only
slept for a couple of hours since I went to bed in 2 o'clock. I
tried multiple
times to request reboots of the server all of which doesn't bringed
the system
back. That wasn't fun really. Right after that I tried to raise a
technical support request asking to check the server's hardware. I
never received any responce from valueweb on my
mail to inform me about the status of my request as usual!
Damned valueweb, this stupid bastards ARGHH!. At 9:30 our project
manager ringed to ask what's wrong with the mails.
Well what might it be, a hardware crash.
She had to call to America where the colocation resides, and ask
them to move on with the hardware test, otherwise valueweb won't
move their finger.
Of course I was right the system hard drive was broken. And
required replacement, after few calls from the office and my quick
suggestion to change all
clients smtp and pop3 server to point to the backup server which
thanks God at least worked, they did so (Thanks God).
I took the fast decision to come to the office in Varna since I had
to talk with the tech support
in Florida and help out to some of the clients to correctly setup
the new host in their Thunderbirds
and Outlooks. Yes here you can see how they use me as a tech
support as well.
Many websites are down currently, I have spoken a couple of times
with Florida's tech support which were quite arrogant to me.
Never ever use valueweb or hostway as a dedicated server provider
seriously this guys are bastards!
My idea was to replace the old server with a new one with a better
hardware since it's already broken, however the company CEO was not
keen on the idea again trying to save some money!
You can understand what kind of a "good"CEO he is, since he tries
to cut out costs from the hardware, that way guaranteeing again
future problems.
He suggested to me to try to migrate to Amazon EC2 (Cloud
Computing).
Something impossible since we have specific stuff running on the
server
I had to research and assure myself that this Cloud Computing is a
bulky shit ass just like I thought well it's good for stuff like
facebook, however in our situation it's impossible. You can't
simply migrate all the stuff to cloud computing clapping with a
magic stick.
In the meantime of researching on the topic I found something
inreresting called
check out linode
here .
As a matter of fact I think it's a better solution for plain linux
install than Debian. Just to complete the post I have to say cloud
computing is interesting but it doesn't stand the same ground as a
normal linux install.
A brief funny introduction of Cloud Computing can be seen
in youtube's cloud
computing explained . What wikipedia says about
Cloud Computing is a
nice beginning introduction as well.
Cloud Computing is the latest hype out there is certanly future in
Cloud Computing even though I don't see it to be ready for the
masses, yet.
I have to note that it seems the Linux powered Cloud computing
options ran a Linux Xen, kernel. I haven't tested Xen recently but
the last time I and a colleague of mine did (2 years ago)
,it seemed back then will be completed to be 100% compliant with
the normal linux kernels in the coming 5 years.
However the matter is quite interesting and I have to investigate
further in it soon.
Now we decided to solve the situation by purchasing a newer
dedicated server. The stupid asses from Hostaway need 24 hours to
bring the machine up, you can imagine how insane is that.
In the best case all stuff on the old server would be up and
running in the coming 48 hours or even more... ghah