swherdman.com

Over the years i have been using multiple different web hosts, lately i have grown beyond the help been using shared hosting and for about a year i have been using a VPS from linode.com however as my entrepreneurial ambitions grow i find myself needing more server capacity. After hearing a few rave reviews from my good friend Stuart Ryan I decided to give TurnKey Internet a go.

I have dealt with multiple hosting providers, from personal/small business hosting to multi-tier architecture ISO 27001 grade enterprise managed hosting solution running financial applications for some of the largest national and international financial institutions.

For this i am going to try a new review structure, i am going to review the service over 30 days.

Day 0 – Ordering

The ordering process went fairly straight forward, not the fanciest ordering system in the word but it defiantly gets the job done, Every major option can be specified from operating system with a verity of control panel choices to Managed backups and business continuity insurance. The only one thing i found strange was i didn’t get an order confirmation email.

Day 1 – Setup

About 12 hours into the 72 hour setup window i had an email sitting in my inbox with notification of my server setup, complete with full list of all the details for the extra IP address blocks i ordered. From this point on there were one or two problems

1. The Root password i specified for my server was sent in plain text in my email, This is kind of akin to sending a pin number for a new credit card to someone on a post card. This seems to be a standard these days for services like this, either a warning that the password would be sent in plain text or some sort of random generated password would have been nicer but this is pretty standard these days.
2. As the server i specified had a fair chunk of CPU and memory i went for the VMware ESX option. While i did get the latest major version ESX 5.0 it was one major update behind the latest version a minor hiccup but worth noting, this is a fairly easily thing i could do yourself but a bit of a pain none the less
3. The serer itself has VT support that allows a Hypervisor to support 64Bit Operating systems, however this wasn’t enabled by default. Its a common mistake to make, most servers to date i have dealt with in the last 12-18 months come with this option enabled by default. This is a good opportunity to try the support.

Day 1 – Support

The support portal is pretty well integrated into the customer portal, the support from is basic but comprehensive form, but not to the point that you often find with such systems where there are endless compulsory fields that always seem to get in the way.

For the support team it was around 9pm on Saturday, however 47 minutes later the the ticket had been upgraded to a Level 3 Tech and was asking permission to reboot the server to enable the BIOS option i requested. It took a bit of back and forth and two reboots to get the problem solved but 1 hour and 36 minutes i was installing two 64 Bit Debian Servers.

Things Missing

I feel a service like this is missing a good DNS service, since Every DNS has gotten a little harder. Linode offers a fantastic free DNS service, i feel myself missing this service all ready, while i can always run my own DNS service, i prefer to have it manged by someone else. for now i still have most of my services running on linode until i can find a better way to sort out my DNS.

Conclusion

Over all, the service i have gotten is fantastic, good prices, speedy implementation and unbelievable service, so far i can see my list of services with TurnKey Internet expanding in the future.

Update: Confirmed that this process works on svn 1.7.3 and 1.7.4, Works well on Debian Lenny (5.0) so if you have problems and your running Etch (4.0) or older please try and upgrade

At the time of writing Subversion 1.7.x wasn’t in the Debian Apt tree, and as i wanted to use the new HTTPv2 access method i decided to try my hand at building it from source.

I started with a bare bones Debian 6.0.3 box, the only non standard package i installed was ssh.

First off lets let apt-get do all the hard work when it comes to solving the dependencies for building SVN 1.7, we also may as well install Apache2 at this point. I have also added vim as its my text editor of choice for CLI

Be warned, for me i needed 477 (432mb) packages to this may take awhile to get and install

From here, lets use wget to grab the latest source package, the latest version should aways be listed on the Source Downloads on the Subversion website. at time of writing this is 1.7.1

Once this is done extract and install like any other package

Now if our like me you plan to use Apache2 need to copy the modules to the appropriate dir

Now to build a few config files, i prefer vim for my CLI text editing so i’m going to install it now, feel free to

Simple config just copy and paste the text below

Now lets enable the module and restart apache

If you don’t get any errors, Chances everything is installed and configured correctly, you can always use the –version switch on svn or svnadmin to confrim

So its installed, but lets setup a quick and dirty test repo to confrim that apache is working

Config for /etc/apache2/conf.d/svn_test

Restart Apache then you should be good to go

Now browse to http://your_server/svn and you should see a screen similar to the one below

What you should see in your browser

From here you have the worlds most basic SVN server setup, no restrictions or limitations but if your just installing something on your local pc/network this may be enough for you, I plan to follow this up with a post about how i migrated 200gb 300,000+ revision corporate repo from my old 1.6.x server to my new 1.7.1 server

Wanted to be able confirm that a user had really changed their Active Directory password when they claimed they had, Powershell was easy enough, but took me a bit to find it

or if you just want all the properties of the user, drop the pipe to filter

So running my first Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 Deployment, Did the pilot and the design on 5.0 SP1 but when 5.5 came out the first day i saw no reason not to jump straight to 5.5. As i work for a software development company the requirements for developer are quite high so we took some careful consideration when designing the environment as one must when every user us utalising their own Oracle or MS SQL Database plus some JBoss and Eclipse thrown in for good measure.

Long story short we split up the system to a C: and a D: drive for OS and installs respectively, All well and good, nothing in any of the citrix design guides i read saying this wasent possable? XenDesktop just links into VMware and esentially clones the VM right? Wrong! think its best summed up by the one line i got from Citrix support

The Machine Creation Service will always recognise only the first drive, if you require desktops with multiple drives you would work around the MCS by using PVS to stream disks, use partitioning, or manually add disks after MCS has deployed the VM’s.

Thanks Citrix…..

There’s alot of talk about the Nexus OS not supporting VTP and where it does its only on the 7K series ant it only supports transparent mode. This is a bit out of date.

Once little thing i found after a moderate ammount of digging it is fully supported in the 5.x series of NX-OS, Namely Cisco NX-OS Release 5.0(2)N2(1)

Version Info

All modes supported

Generic Config

Install and Enable the mod

Apply config to vhost

Restart Apache

Upgraded from Highlight Source Pro to CodeColorer as one of the latest updates fixed a bug where it didn’t like my theme. Also upgraded to the latest WordPress Version

Shouldn’t cause any problems but if someone gets a mangled page let me know

For all those who use Atlassian Products such as Jira or Confluence, you may or may not be familiar with Crowd now for anyone using Jira and Confluence it can allow you to use your existing user DB for multiple other systems, Personally i use it as a client access database to keep external users out of my AD database wherever possible while allowing internal users to still access these systems with their AD accounts.

With the right plug-in’s you can hook the system into pretty much everything, the most flexible one is the Apache 2 module, personalty i use it mostly as i had endless troubles getting recursive sub group lockups working with the free Apache modules floating around.

If you need to use a proxy, set it now

For Debian just copy and past the commands below, for other Distrobutions you will need to install the equivalent packages

Then to download, install and build the required modules the commands below should work.

From Here the Atlassian Article Integrating Crowd with Apache is the best place to go

My Previous post Subversion 1.6 on Debian Lenny has been quite popular! So i thought i should post this next snippet for people, Its the process i used for upgrading my 1.6.1 setup as detailed in the previous post to 1.6.3.

The previous post pulled packages from the experimental branch, This one pulls from the Sid (unstable) branch as it is more up to date then experimental.

Below are the commands i used for a 64bit OS, dont have any 32bit SVN servers lying around anymore so i don’t have a system to work out the require 32bit packages but in theory it should be as simple as changing “amd64″ to “i386″ in all the URL’s below

You will need to restart Apache after the upgrade

Currently the Version of Subversion in Debian Lenny is 1.5.1, there are a few bugs in this that could be show stoppers if you are using a write through proxy setup for your SVN Repo’s as i have. There are two bugs that keep cropping up, one that is solved in 1.5.5, the other in 1.6, however if you want to use debian packages the easiest way i have found to install them is as follows

Update 1: Few people are having problems, this guide assumes your running lenny with the default svn packages already installed, to do this try running the command below to install the latest version from apt (1.5.x as i write this) including the required Apache modules

Update 2: New post on how to extend this guide to go from svn 1.6.1 to svn 1.6.3 – Debian: Upgrade Svn 1.6.1 to 1.6.3

Update 3:This post was originally just some notes for me on highly critical production servers that all had to be running exactly the same versions and i had to have a very controled upgrade, However google sends a few hundred people here a month! So i thought id include the better general way that has been in the comments for awhile

Update 4: Guide now available for SVN 1.7

The best way are the commands below.

Original Post

32Bit

64 Bit