[nylug-talk] Mail servers on dynamic IP addresses soon to be shunned nearly everywhere.

[Sunny Dubey]

On Saturday 03 February 2007 22:09, Michael B Allen wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:42:29 -0500
>

> o Choose your distro. Linode has about a dozen or so UML images to
>   choose from.
>

Many of which are out-dated and remote root exploitable by default.  They're 
offering FC2, but FC6 is most recent.

> o Can't load kernel modules.
>

That is a limitation of UML, and not Xen.  To make matters worse, being that 
UML kernels are massive monolithic beasts without any modules, 8 megs or so 
is instantly taken up from your RAM allocation needlessly.  (The 
nitty-gritty:  The UML guest/client kernel runs as a process from a regular 
user as a host.  So modifying the UML kernel is essentially modifying a 
binary being run on the host, and thus allowing you to do what you want.  The 
case is not the same for Xen, as Xen guest kernels interact in a secure 
layered manner with the host machine.  Thus modifying the kernel is of no 
consequence to the host machine.)

When selecting a VPS I offer some biased advice:

Get one that offers more binary package distros than source distros.  While 
today's virtualization technologies are great at splitting up CPU/RAM 
resources, they suck splitting up IO resources.  When you have 8 different 
guests on a single machine hitting the damn swap because their emerges have 
too many retard flags, things beeccoommmeeee rrreeeaaalll sllloowwww.  And 
its not even a CPU resource issue.  RPM distros swap files and carry on with 
life.  (The situation today is a lot better than it used to be.  But login to 
any VPS during peak hours and start typing on vim, there is a noticeable lag 
that doesn't exist at 5am.)

Like all hosting solutions try to find existing customers's IPs and verify 
them against all the RBL lookup websites.  See if the company itself uses 
their own customer IP pool for their own website and such.  (After all, if 
the admins are proactive in regards to spam, illegal stuff, etc ... they 
should have no problems using their own IP pool ...)

But yeah, $20/mo is unbeatable stuff.

-- 
Sunny Dubey

  mail:  sunny at opencurve.org
  tele:  212.333.3542