archived.neilpahl.com (my old site)

Entry 2: Fiddling with The Available Virtual Images

Topic: Xen Based Cloud VPS   

Created on Sat, 31 Mar 2012.

There I was getting things started, when... It was just too tempting so...

I deleted my ubuntu 10.04 64 bit PV image of my server and decided to take a gander at what else this Xen Based Cloud Hosting had to offer.

FIrst of all, after my confirations to delete the virtual cloud server, I only had to wait seconds before I could deploy a new server. And now I could test any of their supports OSs.

This had me thinking back to all the time I spent reinstalling different distros back when I was first giving linux a shot. Having a virtual host like this would of been real nice. However, none of the servers run guis... and I guess I could of achieved a similar thing had I used just plain old virtual machines.

But, the way I can just pick and choose them, and have them deployed instantly (I can delete one, and deploy in less than a min) is quite convinient and efficient.

Unfortunatley, it takes a while to test out different distros and learn the real diffreences behind them. From what I've seen they are all capable of dishing out the services you need them too but things get a little painfull to setup if they are not desined for your distro. I always feel a slight disapointment when software does not list my distro specifically in the installation instructions. Also, I often use "The Linux Administrators HandBook" for reference which I like how they explain the cases specific to each distro. For now, I'm most comfortable with Ubuntu.

So, what I was really interested in Testing out within my cloud virtual server was teh large selection of turnkey linux distros. I think If I weren't so enthused about linux systems, then I'd just use a turnkey distro like the turnkey tomcat distro which would let me host java apps out of the box.  I still beleive, however, that there still can be traps for someone who is generally unfamiliar with linux systems when using turnkey linux (or any linux or that matter). I can imagine the case where they do something silly like forget to change the default pw (i've seen it happen for someone reputable liek EA games), or mess up some file restricitons and ACL's. So I hope those turnkey linux's have good documentation for things like these.

I really think that if I had a client base large enough which wanted oen specific thing, then it would be so easy to just use those turnkey distros and not have to worry too much about it.

On the other hand, as a custom solutions maker, I will stick with ubuntu and install and configure what I need and on my own. for now~

PLEASE let me know if I'm doing something wrong, or if you have any suggestions or requests~

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