VPS Enquiry

Hey there,

I will be happy to answer your questions. With regards to Cloud Hosting, when you create a Linode on our platform you are reserving hardware on our hosts and assigned an IP address for that Linode. The IP address should not change for the Linode so long as the Linode stays in the same datacenter, so any license that is applied specifically to the IP address should not encounter any errors.

As far as the operating systems on the Linode, our platform is designed for Linux and we offer several Linux images you can install onto a Linode you create. That being said, you can also upload your own custom image if you desire. We’ve heard of Windows being run on KVM Linodes with success. While we aren’t able to provide direct support for Windows nor security recommendations, you may want to review the following two community-supplied guides which give you an overview of the steps involved in setting up Windows on our platform.

• https://gist.github.com/EugeneKay/1ff78396b57f25e69f1d

• https://github.com/ClickSimply/docs/blo … ode-vps.md">https://github.com/ClickSimply/docs/blob/windows-on-linode/docs/tools-reference/windows-on-linode/installing-windows-on-linode-vps.md

Looking at that bounce, I'm sorry you experienced this issue. You can email support@linode.com directly from your email address and we will be able to assist you further. That being said, I did a little digging and can you confirm the domain you were attempting to send from? It looks like the email address may have been @active8.net.au which will not work on our system because it does not appear to have a proper DNS entry. That being said, the domain activ8.com.au looks like it would have a proper DNS entry and if that's your email address's domain you should be able to send an email via the contact form.

For the IRC client, I'm sorry you were not able to connect through it. Taking a look at the channel logs, I do see a user with the nick WilliamK signed in twice. Were you not able to type into the channel? Can you provide a little more information about what you experienced?

If you would like, you can contact us via email directly at support@linode.com or give us a call 24/7 in the US at 855-454-6633 or internationally at +1 609-380-7100.

I hope this helps point you in the right direction. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please don't hesitate to let us know.

-Stephen Crane

When logging into the IRC with Firefox, login failed. When logging in with Chrome I could not type anything.

I could not find a contact form anywhere, just a hyperlink for support@linode.com which did not like my ISPs mail server.

PS: Who backs up the VPS image? What precautions do you take to preserve my data?

That definitely sounds odd on the irc client connection- I was sitting in the room when you tried coming in both times and it looked like a normal connection; you just didn't say anything.

As for your mail issue - it's definitely a misconfig on your ISP's side. The outbound mail server (one of them at least) is announcing itself as 'mail.active8.net.au' and I'm wagering they really meant for it to says 'mail.activ8.net.au' (without that 'e' in activ8). Many remote mail servers will verify that the name a sending server identifies itself with actually exists in DNS before accepting a mail. mail.active8.net.au does not exist, so the mail isn't accepted. There's also checks to make sure the IP matches the name, but your mail isn't even getting that far.

If you want to send a mail to your support folks at the ISP, you can tell them something along the lines of:

I recently had a mail bounce back from someone because their mail server said:
"Recipient address rejected: SPF-Result=artistscope.com: 'SERVFAIL' error on DNS 'A' lookup of 'mail.active8.net.au' (in reply to RCPT TO command)"

That looks like our mail server at activ8 is using the wrong name during the helo/ehlo portion of the smtp connection due to having an extra 'e' in the activ8 portion.

You could probably forward the whole bounce mail to them to help them track down which server it was exactly that has it misconfigured (it should be in the headers of your mail).

As for backups - you are responsible for backups. Linode does have a backup add-on that is reasonably priced and it works relatively well for a daily backup - https://www.linode.com/backups

It is generally good form to also take other offiste backups that you store somewhere safe.

That being said, I've been using Linode for more than a decade now and haven't yet had a dataloss issue.

> That being said, I've been using Linode for more than a decade now and haven't yet had a dataloss issue.

What happens in the case of drive failure?

Most hard drives are warranted to last for only two years. I once had 2 drives die at the same time so my mirrored drive took everything with it.

Backing up an 80 GB image takes forever, so how can Linode assure me that I won't lose data?

Unless they've changed something, they use raid10 enterprise SSD's for the storage. So potentially, two of those physical drives could fail and there wouldn't be dataloss. In many cases, Linode can spot a potential hardware impacting event ahead of time and a Linode can be migrated to a new host (there's an email notification/ticket notification and then you can schedule doing the migration yourself in most cases).

Generally though, most cloud providers aren't going to give you assurance about your data - that's going to always be on you. On the other hand, they've got a pretty big interest in your feeling pretty good that you won't have to worry about it except in extreme conditions.

As for 80gb taking forever - I can give you some typical numbers that I see using the Linode Backup service. One of my 48gb linodes has all 768GB of allocated storage provisioned and mostly used (about 570GB used). It's nightly Linode backup completes in between 48 and 62 minutes. A 12gb linode that has 158GB of it's allocated 192GB has its nightly Linode backups taking about 6-7 minutes. Linode backups are wonderfully fast. If you wanted to look at doing a backup with something else to get copies off site regularly, you'd probably want to consider something that'll do incrementals and differentials rather than a full backup every night (or whatever period you want it).

I coudn't find any specs beyond general references for OS versions.

For example for my first build I need to support the latest version of Moodle and its minimum requirements are:

PHP 7.0, MySQL 5.5.31

I prefer CentOS and without a CP so that I can use Webmin. Is that possible? Do you have a link providing what choices I do have?

You setup the server; you'll have root access to it when it's up. You are installing the OS (supported ones that are easy to setup here - https://www.linode.com/distributions; but you could feasibly install others if you were motivated). You are installing the applications and services along with configuring them. If you want php7, install php7!

There's a getting started guide at https://www.linode.com/docs/getting-started/ that you should check out; it walks you through doing an install. There's a whole bunch of docs available at https://www.linode.com/docs/

What is the 256 MB Swap Image and what is it used for?

@WilliamK:

What is the 256 MB Swap Image and what is it used for?

https://www.linux.com/news/all-about-linux-swap-space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging#Sw … partitions">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging#Swapfilesand_partitions