for keeping track of my digital experiments

The setup
Recently I started leasing an OpenVZ VPS (virtual private server) from Shinjiru hosting. Their servers are located in Malaysia in seven different data centers. Mine happens to be located in Kuala Lumpur. The customer support I experienced was very good. The sales reps responded to my emails in less than a business day, with English that was pretty good for not being native speakers. I was even able to negotiate a lower priced VPS plan, since I didn’t need any control panel.

The technical details
The choices for operating systems are a bit old. I was hoping to use Debian 4.1 or CentOS 5, but the best I could get was CentOS 4.4. Their default VPS image install includes SSHd (obviously), Apache 2 with Perl, PHP, PHPMyAdmin, AWstats, Analog, MySQL, sendmail and a POP3 server. Unfortunately YUM was not installed, so I had download the source and compile it. Not that it is extremely difficult, but processing tar.gz files and getting the install configured just right is tedious. After I compiled yum I then had to get the configuration files just right. I learned that certain packages don’t like to be updated or installed in an OpenVZ VPS, such as gcc or any gcc dependencies. Thanks to the RPM Search, I managed to get all the dependencies worked out and installed. My first priority after getting yum to work was killing off ftpd and installing vftpd. After getting things cleaned up, I installed the Webmin minimal version (from source). I didn’t want to use yum on this one, because the full version has all these extra utilities with the package that I don’t need.

The conclusion
Shinjiru offers great offshore hosting. It would be even better if they had newer operating systems. The latency is pretty good as offshore servers go. The latency for my VPS runs around 300 – 330ms when I ping it from my home DSL connection (Qwest DSL in St. Paul, Minnesota). If you want some great offshore hosting (where even warez is ok) then I would say that Shinjiru is going to be your best bet.

I needed to post up a couple of useful links/tools so I could find them again easily. Maybe you, the reader, will find them useful as well.

1. Internet Anagram Server: Perfect for getting new ideas so as to avoid copyright and trademark infringement.
2. Wireless Phone Number – Carrier Search: After receiving a random text from +16126367372 which said, “Gurl do u no where i can buy a cute prom dress”, I wanted to see what kind a person was wasting my cell phones minutes. Yes, I’m on a pay as you go plan.
3. The MINIX 3 Operating System: I am looking into creating my own embedded game server and wireless access point that I could jack into my high-gain antenna I’m working on.
4. PC Tools Malware Research Center: For finding out more information on what is going on in the end-user security sector.
5. PHPList: Possible starting point for mailing list script I’m putting together.
6. CushyCMS: Content managing made easy. Perfect for the busy webmaster.

Last weekend I was playing around with running nginx, SSH, vsFTPd, and MediaTomb on this 1GHZ, 512MB RAM machine that I jacked into my network. So let me get the obvious things out of the way first:

• SSH for administering
• vsFTPd for getting files onto the media server
• nginx for serving the media files externally to the WAN

What is this MediaTomb you may ask? It is a DLNA/Media UPnP server daemon, that is administered via a sleek javascript front end, and run by a fast C back end (for nix machines). There were issues though, when I tried accessing it from the new DirecTV set top boxes that have network/internet support built in. According to my dad, who works for DirecTV, the boxes are supposed to be able to access DLNA compliant content. It is not an advertised feature, just an “under development” feature. He says the only reason that ethernet ports are on the set top boxes in the first place is for VOD content, served by Limelight Networks. In the future, the DLNA support will probably be phased out, but for now I guess I’ll get to have some fun.