Linode VPS

Linode 300 Initial Set Up

After checking with a few people signed into the Linode IRC Channel about how long the signup would take and hearing "very quickly", I signed up for a Linode 300 with 10GB of disk and 300MB of RAM for 19.95 USD / month. My Linode was provisioned literally 5 minutes after clicking submit in the webform. I am sure it would take longer if people were offline or asleep, but I have to say I was impressed by the speed of response.

Once you give your card info, an email comes with further instructions. You click a link and are taken to a page that lets you choose the Linode's location. There were two datacenters available - Atlanta and Dallas (Fremont CA was full) - and again checking with people on IRC, I tested downloading a 10MB Video file from both to see how the performance would be from Japan. I got 175 Kbps / sec from the Dallas site, as opposed to 130 Kbps / sec for the Atlanta site, so I chose to create the linode VPS at the Dallas facility.

Once the Linode is created, you can sign into the control panel and decide which Linux Distro to use. I was trying to decide between Debian and Ubuntu having read a number of point-counterpoint type web reviews, and after imposing upon the good souls at the Linode IRC channel, decided to try Ubuntu.

Once you have your Linode's IP address it is easy to log in via ssh:

> ssh root@123.123.123.123

Obviously, root access via ssh is not an optimal situation, so you should quickly set up sshd to disallow this, and start using ssh keys to prevent unwelcome people from accessing.

Set Hostname

The Ubuntu 7.10 that gets set up has no hostname initially (/etc/hostname has "none") so you need to set one. Edit the hostname file. I set my host name to "fire". 

# nano hostname
# hostname -F /etc/hostname 

If you logout and then log back in, your prompt should look like this:

root@fire:~ # 

Set DNS Name and Hosts file

Now set your hosts file to include your IP, FQDN for the host and hostname.

root@esolia-fire:~ # nano /etc/hosts
root@esolia-fire:~ # cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   localhost
123.123.123.123 fire.mydomain.com fire 
...

Make sure your DNS zone has an A record for the FQDN - in my case, I set one up for fire.mydomain.com, pointing at my IP address 123.123.123.123 (obviously that is not the real IP).  

Set the Timezone

I set my timezone thus:

# cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.original
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Japan /etc/localtime
# ls -la /etc/localtime
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Nov 24 14:32 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Japan

Install Ubuntu-Standard

I installed the "ubuntu-standard" package which is convenient to have, and which is availble in the standard repository.

# aptitude install ubuntu-standard 

During the install, prompts come up for lilo and postfix (switching postfix for sendmail). I accepted the defaults for both and removed lilo later like this: 

# aptitude remove lilo

Update Repositories to Include "Universe" and "Multiverse"

Later in this tutorial you will install other software such as php5-mcrypt and procinfo. You cannot find php5-mcrypt in the default repositories any longer (used to be there, apparently), so you can update the repository file to include the "universe" and "multiverse" extras. Your /etc/apt/sources.list should look like this:

root@esolia-fire:/etc/apt # cat sources.list 

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted 
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted 

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe' 
## repository. 
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu 
## team...

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe multiverse 
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy universe multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted 
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted  

Note, gutsy is the current Ubuntu release.

# aptitude update 

Install Useful Programs

For now, I just installed mutt to allow easy mailing from scripts (mutt works where mail does not) and procinfo to allow easy mailing of system info from scripts. Mutt is available in the standard repository, but procinfo requires the above update.

aptitude install mutt procinfo 

root@fire:~ # procinfo
Linux 2.6.23.1-linode36 (root@nova1.theshore.net) (gcc 3.3.3 20040412 ) #1 Sun Nov 4 12:03:06 EST 2007 1CPU [fire.(none)]

Memory:      Total        Used        Free      Shared     Buffers      
Mem:        295528      261984       33544           0       36284
Swap:       262136          52      262084

Bootup: Sat Nov 24 10:52:31 2007    Load average: 0.21 0.05 0.04 1/85 10513

user  :       0:05:37.18   0.3%  page in :   266409  disk 1:    16589r  122332w
nice  :       0:00:00.00   0.0%  page out:  3484604  disk 2:       15r      11w
system:       0:00:42.51   0.0%  page act:   309583
IOwait:       0:00:16.48   0.0%  page dea:   174393
hw irq:       0:00:00.00   0.0%  page flt: 14903418
sw irq:       0:00:00.58   0.0%  swap in :       16
idle  :      21:06:52.33  62.4%  swap out:       18
uptime:   1d  9:50:56.38         context :  8358765

irq  0:  12185633 SIGVTALRM  timer      irq  5:    278255 SIGIO  eth0          
irq  2:         0 SIGIO  console        irq  9:         0 SIGIO  mconsole      
irq  3:         0 SIGIO  console-write  irq 10:         0 SIGIO  winch         
irq  4:    458796 SIGIO  ubd            irq 11:         0 SIGIO  write sigio   
 

Install Prerequisites for Deki Wiki

Next I installed the various prerequisites for Deki Wiki. This is where CentOS 5 just falls apart. Maybe if I understood yum repositories and their myriad dependencies better (or maybe with a different application) I would have had better luck, but I spent too much time on this next part in CentOS and then just gave up. With Ubuntu 7.10, it was relatively painless.

This command initially failed because of php5-mcrypt NOT being available in the default Ubuntu repositories. You have done the update above, so it should work for you.

# aptitude install apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mhash \
php5-gd php5-curl imagemagick wv pdftohtml html2text html2ps wv ppthtml htmldoc aspell \ 
links php-pear curl mysql-server-5.0  

You can install or reinstall, as needed:

# aptitude install php5-mcrypt 
# aptitude reinstall mysql-server-5.0  

And, the above does NOT need to be all on one line. You can separate the package installs:

# aptitude install apache2 php5 
# aptitude install php5-cli 
# aptitude install php5-mysql 
etc... 

The Pesky "Could Not Reliably Determine the Server's FQDN" Error

If you get this:

# aptitude install apache2 
 ...
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName 

... use a text editor to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and add the following to the bottom of the file (actually, the httpd.conf is blank by default and is just for "local" settings):

ServerName localhost 

Note, do not substitute your servername for ServerName. ServerName is a directive here, not a literal.

Install Mono

Install the prerequisite mono so that the dekihost and its C# stuff will run:  

# aptitude install mono-gmcs mono-mcs libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil 

Install Pear XML_RPC etc

# pear install XML_RPC Cache_Lite