It has been pointed out to me that membership in both a fraternity (that may safely be regarded as conservative, although not in the sense this word is misused today) and in the German Pirate Party could lead to a conflict of interest. I disagree. In my opinion, they share a lot of common interests, even if they don't realise it yet. A large percentage of the members in my fraternity are musicians (no surprise there, since it has a clear musical focus), so I'd expect them to be interested in licensing issues around artistic works (with a bias for artists' rights, of course), which plays into a field where the Pirates want to establish one of the "core competences", for which it will in return be necessary for the Pirates to talk to the artists.

Yesterday I wrote about the climate crisis. Today, let's start doing something about it.

Electricity, especially in the United States and China, turns out to be a pretty dirty energy source. Most of our electricity is generated using coal, which despite promises of "clean coal" to come, burns dirty. Not only does it contribute to global warming, but it also has been shown to have an adverse impact on health.

So let's start simple: reduce the amount of electricity our computers consume. Even for an individual person, this can add up to quite a bit of energy (and money) savings in a year. When you think about multiplying this over companies, server rooms, etc., it adds up fast. This works on desktops, servers, laptops, whatever.

The easiest way to save power is with CPU frequency scaling. This is a technology that lets you adjust how fast a running CPU runs, while it's running. When CPUs run at slower speeds, they consume less power. Most CPUs are set to their maximum speed all the time, even when the system isn't using them. Linux has support for keeping the CPU at maximum speed unless it is idle. By turning on this feature, we can save power at virtually no cost to performance. The Linux feature to handle CPU frequency scaling is called cpufreq.

Set up modules

Let's start by checking to see whether cpufreq support is already enabled in your kernel. These commands will need to be run as root.

# cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0
# ls -l

If you see an entry called cpufreq, you are good and can skip to the governor selection below.

If not, you'll need to load cpufreq support into your kernel. Let's get a list of available drivers:

# ls /lib/modules/ uname -r /kernel/arch/*/kernel/cpu/cpufreq

Now it's guess time. It doesn't really hurt if you guess wrong; you'll just get a harmless error message. One hint, though: try acpi-cpufreq last; it's the option of last resort.

On my system, I see:

acpi-cpufreq.ko     longrun.ko      powernow-k8.ko         speedstep-smi.ko
cpufreq-nforce2.ko  p4-clockmod.ko  speedstep-centrino.ko
gx-suspmod.ko       powernow-k6.ko  speedstep-ich.ko
longhaul.ko         powernow-k7.ko  speedstep-lib.ko

For each guess, you'll run modprobe with the driver name. I have an Athlon64, which is a K8 machine, so I run:

#modprobe powernow-k8

Note that you leave off the ".ko" bit. If you don't get any error message, it worked.

Once you find a working module, edit /etc/modules and add the module name there (again without the ".ko") so it will be loaded for you on boot.

Governor Selection

Next, we need to load the driver that tells the kernel what governor to use. The governor is the thing that monitors the system and adjusts the speed accordingly.

I'm going to suggest the ondemand governor. This governor keeps the system's speed at maximum unless it is pretty sure that the system is idle. So this will be the one that will let you save power with the least performance impact.

Let's load the module now:

# modprobe cpufreq_ondemand

You should also edit /etc/modules and add a line that says simply cpufreq_ondemand to the end of the file so that the ondemand governor loads at next boot.

Turning It On

Now, back under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0, you should see a cpufreq directory. cd into it.

To turn on the ondemand governor, run this:

# echo echo ondemand > scaling_governor

That's it, your governor is enabled. You can see what it's doing like this:

# cat cpuinfo_min_freq
800000
# cat cpuinfo_max_freq
2200000
# cat cpuinfo_cur_freq
800000

That shows that my CPU can go as low as 800MHz, as high as 2.2GHz, and that at the present moment, it's running at 800MHz presently.

Now, check your scaling governor settings:

# cat scaling_min_freq
800000
# cat scaling_max_freq
800000

This is showing that the system is constraining the governor to only ever operate on an 800MHz to 800MHz range. That's not what I want; I want it to scale over the entire range of the CPU. Since my cpuinfo_max_freq was 2200000, I want to write that out to scaling_max_freq as well:

echo 2200000 > scaling_max_freq

Making This The Default

The last step is to make this happen on each boot. Open up your /etc/sysfs.conf file. If you don't have one, you will want to run a command such as apt-get install sysfsutils (or the appropriate one for your distribution).

Add a line like this:

devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor = ondemand
devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq = 2200000

Remember to replace the 2200000 with your own cpu_max_freq value.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have a dual-core CPU, or more than one CPU, you'll need to add a line for each CPU. For instance:

devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor = ondemand
devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq = 2200000

You can see what all CPU devices you have with ls /sys/devices/system/cpu.

Now, save this file, and you'll have CPU frequency scaling saving you money, and helping the environment, every time you boot. And with the ondemand governor, chances are you'll never notice any performance loss.

This article showed you how to save power using CPU frequency scaling on Linux. I have no idea if it's possible to do the same on Windows, Mac, or the various BSDs, but it would be great if someone would leave comments with links to resources for doing that if so.

Updated: added scaling_max_freq info

After this blog entry, I thought for a while, and decided to take over Debian package a day. I’m well aware that it needs a lot of time, so I’ll try to make this a collaborative work:

• It should be as easy as possible for readers to submit entries
• There will be a team of editors, willing to dedicate some time to this on a regular basis, who will receive new entries from users, improve them and publish them.

The publishing rate should depend on the number of ready-to-go entries in the queue. Starting with publishing twice a week should be okay. I have already started to set up a wordpress blog (using drafts to prepare entries + mails to coordinate should be enough for now ; we can always switch to something more complex later). TODO List :

1. Get control over the debaday.debian.net domain. I couldn’t do it directly since DAMs seem to want to wait until Christmas to deliver my Debian account, so buxy did it for me. Should resolve soon.
2. Get added to Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. If the posting rate stays low, it shouldn’t be a problem, and we can always change this later.
3. Write the initial pages explaining how to contribute, etc.
4. Get the first entry online.
5. Recruit editors to share the load.
6. Wait for you to submit entries

Update (08/12/06) : Debian Package of the Day won’t be added on Planet Debian: a recent discussion concluded that non-personal blogs should not be on Planet Debian. So you have to subscribe directly to its feed (if you read Planet Ubuntu, you probably don’t need to, since it was added there).

Wow.

We just watched An Inconvenient Truth. Not much in there was new to me, but to see it all presented at once is amazing.

There are vast undisputed scientific facts out there -- for instance, that CO2 content in the atmosphere is higher than it's been ever -- and we can go back 650,000 years. The linkage between that and temperatures is inescapable.

Gore makes a good point: shouldn't we be worried about more than terrorism?

Does the thought of parts of Manhattan, San Francisco, and large parts of Florida going underwater suggest a problem exists?

This really is critical and urgent.

We've already been thinking about it lately as we renovate our house. We're paying a little more now for things like airtight insulation, low-energy lighting, efficient heating. Not only will it save us money in the long run, it will help improve our lives and Jacob's life down the road.

The movie's website is over at climatecrisis.net.

In the news:

* Gates approved as new defence head

How's that for frightening? But, no, it's not Bill Gates. =)

* Victoria's Secret catalogue no longer in pulp friction

At Opus a few years ago, there were some folks doing a letter writing campaign to get Victoria's Secret to stop using Caribou habitat wood in their catalogues. It seems that it's now been successful.

In other news, TD Meloche Monnex can't provide a definition of when we will be living in the new place in order for them to insure it. I've done the rounds with two people now to try and sort out whether they'd be willing to insure or not. They can't decide whether us living in the new place is when we're eating and sleeping there or when every last box has moved. They're pretty happy to tell me that it's a grey area. I hear that as a pretty clear "you're screwed if you need to make a claim". Next!

That said, I took some pictures of the place this evening while we were moving some boxes over. We're trying to make this place not look cluttered. Will post them soon.

Also, note to self: Stairs are slippery. Luckily I was near the bottom step when I discovered this. Walking is a bit sore, but still okay. *sigh*

Hello (first of all, there are new pictures of me)
I think it’s time for another blog, because I have at the moment many different projects. My prio 1 project is the new proxy server which I would like to install in the office (about 500 users) which should have complicated ACLs and SquidGuard for content filtering, a virus scanner would also be very nice. I plan to authenticate the users via winbind on Microsoft ActiveDirectory (I already blogged about it some months ago) and the embedded systems should have special rules which don’t require an authentication. I also had a look at dansguardian because the people from the AIO use this solution, but I don’t think that it’s possible to auth against AD with it and I have no experience with dansguardian. The next problem is with the downtime, I should not have any if possible. This means that I will copy the system of the old proxy into a VMWare-Machine in the intranet and NAT the public IP of the proxy to it when it’s ready. And in this time I can easily setup the new proxy on the physical proxy-machine. Then my next project is for the school - we have to write a management tool (including file-databases) for network devices such as switches or routers, I think this will be a quite funny task and 2 months are IMHO enough time. The cool thing is that we need something like that on my workplace so we will be able to use it. My program also will be licensed under a free license and maybe I will build a debian package if the upstream software is in a good shape. Then the next (maybe less important, but important for my health) project is finally stop smoking. I really didn’t think that this is so difficult because I’m not a “i need it every 2 hours”-smoker, I only need it in the evening when I come home to relax a bit and this is really quite difficult. Then my last (really hard ) project is planning my holidays, I didn’t use them since summer of this year and until next august I can have 5 weeks + the days from christmas until 3rd January, so my plan is the following: 15.12.2006 Last workday 26.12 - 30.12 23c3 in Berlin 31.12 - 1.12 Snowboarding in the mountains and sylvester party with friends Then in february 2007 I will go again snowboarding for a week somewhere And in june 2007 my last holidays for this year where I’d like to visit Debconf7 (depends if I get sponsoring for accomodation and food or not, you know… I’m still a student and edinburgh isn’t really cheap). I hope this will be my last article without the hackergotchi included, I’m not a graphics-guru so I asked in #debian.de some minutes ago and Markus Gloor made one for me, biggest thanks!

Yesterday I was planning and prepared to hold the last session of the Obroni Computer Club that I ran at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner College. Very disappointingly, nobody showed up. Well, not entirely true: The computer lab was crammed full, as ususal around that time, but nobody was there for the club.It might have been because there were no club sessions the last two weeks because of exams, and the students forgot that I told them that there will be another session after that in a mail back then. It might have been because the IG2 class (10th grade), which presumedly make up the largest part of the club, had a meeting at that time. Or it might just be that I did not mange to awaken the student s interest and nobody cared.I have put all material for the club, together with various other documents from my SOSHGIC time, on the Ghana contents section of my now (mostly) bi-lingual and very slightly redesigned homepage.

Well, forget anything you've heard about how well developed is Brazil in terms of FLOSS. The gov't loves FLOSS, the NGOs and even a lot of companies too, right? Wrong!

With just a few exceptions (and i think i work in one of them and i'm glad), the FLOSS hype in Brazil is a marketing thing. Even the most proprietary software defender needs to agree that FLOSS and every aspect of it, has appeal where there's not enough money or where the money isn't being distributed in a fair manner.

The point is that a lot of gov't institutions, NGOs and companies are using the FLOSS appeal and its arguments with the masses to do what a brazilian does best (after playing soccer): Corruption. The recipe is simple: Tell as much people as possible that you're developing the FLOSS 'foo' and ask for funding - even companies do that here and when they don't, they join a gov't institution. You know, when you haven't compromises with results and the law and have contacts it isn't that hard get some money here and there for your 'foo' project.

Many times nobody out of the project office (when there's a real one) ever see the source code of that and in a lot of times it will be delayed forever or it will suck - but when it sucks they blame the 'community' (they don't know the difference between user and developer community). Wait, but where's all that money? The money is in the same places where part of the 3 trillions of dollars (no, i'm not wrong) that were used by less developed countries during the past years from the north-american and european banks. Go figure...

My hint for these FLOSS advocates in Brazil and those with some money for funding projects here: Hire somebody that have a vague idea what a user community, developer community, software licenses and source code are in the next time.

Multiple times we’ve talked about having a Debian-Developer-Gallery. That could be something like all the pictures from various conferences and events, to just having a mugshot of each registered developer. So :

1. Is this a good idea?
2. Do you have a picture you’d like to be included?

I’m volunteering to setup a simple site which will contain one photograph of each Debian Developer (ideally which they will submit themselves, I’m not sure how to handle the case of somebody saying “This pictures is foo@debian.org” when foo didn’t authorise/expect it to become public.) This simple site will be accessed via:

• http://mugshots.debian.net/foo/

Each page will contain:

• Link to the homepage of dd-foo, as found in LDAP.
• One single image of user foo. Thumbnail if “too big” linking to the full size version.
• (Optionally links to QA.d.org, etc, but that is secondary to this purpose.)

(No ratings, no tagging, possibly a “random user” link, or an index by username. Nothing complex or too dynamic) Suggestions for a better name would be appreciated. I figure either “faces” or “mugshots” - since the obvious “gallery.d.net” is already taken. So .. comment here if you think this is a good idea. Or feel free to mail me a link/attached image. Assuming I get say 50 developers thinking this is a good idea I will setup the DNS alias and put the site live. Bandwidth will be minimal, but I think having the friendly faces (?!) visible would be a good thing. And will make identification of people prior to meetings signficantly easier. (At times like this I wish I could host a real poll .. but ignoring that for a second.)

At work we've just bought online another server, so we have a true public/private server split. The private server is only accessible via secure methods, and the public server only has a few users to reduce the possibility of people brute-forcing their way in. However, the public server holds the APT repositories for debian.o-hand.com and maemo.o-hand.com. Before the split this was not a problem, after building the package dput was used with the scp method, and then mini-dinstall was run as the user to update the repository. Now that there are minimal accounts on the new server, we can't scp the packages to the server, or ssh in to run mini-dinstall. Running m-d in daemon mode solves the latter, but there is still the problem of getting the files on the server in the first place. Enter WebDAV. The public server already has a number of WebDAV shares (secure client shares, Subversion, and so on) so it was trivial to export the mini-dinstall incoming queues over WebDAV. With a custom init script to start mini-dinstall in daemon mode, anyone with the right permissions can upload files via WebDAV. One option here is to use Nautilus, but I like the safety of dput. A day of hacking, with lots of screaming at Python's urllib2, produced this patch to dput that adds HTTP uploading. I've been using it for a few days now and it seems to be working well, so hopefully it will be merged into Sid soon. NP: Xmas in Frisko, soma.fm

Not being one to stick with what I know, over the last few days I've been trying to put a RESTful sheen on a small app I'm toying with. It's quite simple -- there's really only one type of resource I need to deal with, and I've got a solid URI structure to refer to it all. So far, so good. I've read all the theoretical stuff about how URIs should be nouns, and the HTTP action should be the verb -- and I agree with the sentiment, at least for this system I'm writing[1]. I can even (I think) model all of that stuff using my framework of choice, the ever-hyped-but-good-despite-that Ruby on Rails. There's even fairly explicit support in Rails for a lot of what I want to do, with automatic Content-Type: and Accept: handling logic built-in. But this thing is, primarily, a web app, not a web service. I want the RESTful thing so I can interact with the app programmatically, but at the end of the day, I expect most interactions will be via the good ol' HTML. How, then, do I implement my HTML interface so that my user's browser does the right thing with my resources? My REST resource http://example.com/widgets/1337 will do the right thing if an appropriately-credentialled user issues a DELETE /widgets/1337 request, but how do I tell a browser to do that? The "traditional" way I've done that sort of thing, in Rails, is to encode the verb in the URL, like so: /widgets/delete/1337, but I completely agree with the idea that a GET request shouldn't modify data[2]. So I'm completely sold on the idea of not encoding actions into the URI itself. I'm also a DRY[3] kind of guy, and one of the things that has always slightly irritated me about web services is that, when you write them alongside a HTML-oriented webapp, you often have to duplicate logic (even if it's not very much) to get both versions working. Considering that both the webapp and the REST service are using URLs in pretty much the same fashion, it seems very wasteful to have to design two subtly different schemes to handle the two nearly-identical sets of requirements. So, having written this article without managing to figure the answer for myself, I invite comment (sent to mpalmer@hezmatt.org, and I'll summarise later). How do I tell a user's browser to issue a DELETE or PUT against a URL? Am I being overly idealistic to expect the two access methods to be somewhat comparable? Should I just give up and encode the action I want in my URL, or maybe the parameters to the POST request? Am I even completely misunderstanding REST, and trying to find answers in it that just aren't there?

---

1. I have some slight qualms about the idea that every possible interaction with any possible system could be modelled using an unlimited noun set and four verbs, but I'm happy to leave that debate alone for the moment, as I don't have anywhere near enough experience to speak intelligently, and I have more basic problems at the moment anyway. 2. I remember the common story of the website where the 'delete' hyperlinks are regular GET requests, and the first Google spidering of the website causes everything to be deleted, resulting in a very bare database. This is a result I'm keen to avoid. 3. Don't Repeat Yourself -- a phrase that should be tattooed on the inside of every developer's eyelids.

Use categories! That s right. Suppose for instance that you stopped contributing to Debian months ago and are enjoying your new fulfilling existence as a Slackware developer. You are obviously not only directly responsible for Etch being late due to your lack of involvement, but also contributing to the inane blogorrheic Slackware-only drivel that makes Planet Debian readers wonder why they subscribed to Planet Slackware. So if Planet Debian uses your http://www.happy.slacker/blog/xml/atom10/feed.xml feed, you just need to replace it with http://www.happy.slacker/blog/xml/atom10/category/debian/feed.xml and all your articles tagged "debian" will appear on Planet Debian!

With your bug count in the air and your Etch on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your RM will collapse
But there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?
Where is Debian? Way out in the money
See it dunkin' I was squasin' for free
Bugs were hiding behind the money
Except the little board
But they told me, he swears
Tryin' to release me me me
Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?
Where is Debian? Ooooh
With your bug count in the air and your Etch on the ground
Ooooh
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Ooooh
Ooooh Thanks to The Pixies.

It seems that some people with heavily customised Ubuntu installations have had problems upgrading from dapper to edgy. While we do test upgrades as much as we can, there’s no way to test every possible permutation, so problems do creep in. Here’s a checklist to perform before upgrading to minimise any problems you might have:

• Make sure you have the ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-desktop packages installed (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. should use the appropriate meta-packages for their distribution). This may require removing some replacement programs you have installed, but you can always put those back after the upgrade process.
• Check for any locally installed packages, you can use aptitude search '~i!~Oubuntu' to get a list of them. Some of these may cause conflicts with the upgrade process, it may be worth removing them and putting them back after the upgrade.
• If you have manually installed any software from upstream, and not used Ubuntu packages (especially the Nvidia or ATI binary drivers), revert those to the Ubuntu-provided versions before upgrading.
• Use the update manager, as described in the release notes, and not apt-get dist-upgrade. While the latter may work eventually, it will require more manual tinkering than the automatic upgrader.

If, after taking all of these precautions, your upgrade still fails; please file a bug report, and try to include as much information as possible. Provide the list of packages that failed, and if possible the error message provided by them. Provide /var/log/dpkg.log and the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade.

Last weekend I spent a couple days doing the usual marathon of beating my brains out against the wall of debian-cd, and got the following image added to the weekly full CD builds: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-kde-CD-binary-1.iso (Also for other arches of course.) This is a CD that will install KDE instead of the Gnome desktop that comes in the other etch install media. You can get the same effect without this special CD, if you have a good internet connection, by booting a current daily of the installer as follows:

install tasks=kde-desktop

The kde-desktop task may not be as complete and well-rounded as the gnome-desktop task has become thanks to stratus's work, but it should be at least a good basic KDE desktop. PS, it's entirely a cooincidence that I happen to be announcing this from Germany. :-)

On Thursday, 24th of November 2006 evening (about one and a half week ago) we got an anonymous Symlink submission about gaia 0.1.0, a simple, but free (GPL‘ed) client for Google Earth, solely based on reverse engineering. Liked the idea of a really free client for such a popular service, so I posted it as Symlink article (German) quite shortly after noticing the submisson. Since it’s under GPL and uses only libraries already being in Debian (OpenGL, SCons, cURL, SDL, libjpeg, libpng, libgps and Doxygen), I really would like to see it in Debian. But since I have never programmed with most of them, I did not try to compile gaia but instead took the easy way for myself and filed an RFP bug for it in Debian. The next day in office, Gürkan, a coworker of mine and currently in NM, told me that he tries to package gaia for Debian and that it doesn’t compile on Sarge. So I gave him access to my Sid chroot and asked him if he has read about the RFP at debian-devel or debian-wnpp. To my surprise he answered that he didn’t read about it on Debian lists at all but on Symlink and therefore didn’t knew about the RFP at all. So I pointed him to the RFP just to notice, that it wasn’t an RFP anymore but already an ITP. Strangely I didn’t get any mail notice about this change although the retitling happend only shortly after the initial RFP… Of couse, Gürkan wasn’t very happy about this, since he planned to maintain gaia himself, but at least he provided his working proof of concept package for Sid to Jordà Polo who intends to maintain an official Debian package of gaia. We then also met Jordà on the #debian-games channel in OFTC. He told us, that he’ll check some more licensing issues before uploading a package of gaia. Well, since I had a working gaia package installed in my Sid chroot, you can probably imagine what I did half the evening? Right: Surfing around the earth with gaia and visiting my favourite places on earth. While virtually visiting places here and there, I listened to Venty’s first podcasts and seem to have downloaded 444 MB of Google Earth images (at least according to du -sh ~/.gaia). Goddamned addiction! ;-) During the night from Friday to Saturday, I got a mail that the RFP/ITP has been closed and that Jordà was right with his suspiciousness: Google has sent a cease and desist letter to the gaia developers and they removed the downloads from their site. (So how was that Google motto? “Don’t be evil”? Well, good joke! Yet again the monopolist clearly shows that it doesn’t really mean what it says.) Since the gaia developers were allowed to post the mail from Google on their website, you can read parts of it there. I really wonder what was written in the left out parts of the mails. Job offers? ;-) But it’s interesting to see that until one week ago gaia 0.1.0 already made it into the FreeBSD ports as well as into the ArchLinux User Repository. Both noticed, too, that gaia version 0.1.0 has been withdrawn by the authors. Today in the morning Gürkan noticed that there’s a new version (0.1.1) of gaia at SourceForge using free NASA WorldWind / OnEarth imagery. Although the imagery is far away from the detailedness of the Google Earth imagery, this has one big advantage: There wasn’t really a X port for the windows-only client from NASA until now. (No real wonder, since they use proprietary and operating specific libraries such as .NET and DirectX…) And now we have gaia, a free client for free imagery on free operating systems. That made my day! I hope that this will revive the packaging of gaia, at least Gürkan has already built a new proof of concept package of 0.1.1 for Sid. (Today in the afternoon, they released 0.1.2.) And if everything goes fine and Dunc-Bank manages to delay Etch until gaia has been 10 days in Unstable without bugs, we’ll have it even in Etch. ;-)

As a reaction to what is happening in Debian, following the renames of Firefox to iceweasel, Thunderbird to icedove, Mozilla to iceape, cdda2wav to icedax,… (also notice the lack of capital letters, in the original names) abcde will be renamed to icetheripper, trac to icekeepmeupdated and spamassassin to iceshitmailkiller. Blah… UPDATED: icedax, not iceadx

Back in June, I wrote about my switch to VPSLink for my virtual private server (VPS) host.

Now it's 6 months later, my initial contract is up, and it's time to consider whether to renew it.

Overall, VPSLink has worked out reasonably well. I have their Link-4 plan, which provides 512MB RAM, 20GB of disk storage, and 500GB of bandwidth for $40/mo (or down to $33/mo if you pay for 12 months in advance).

Reliability and Uptime

VPSLink has been reasonably reliable. I wouldn't say that they have been exceptionally reliable, though.

Some outages:

• Back in July, the server was down for more than 8 hours. vpslink support blamed it on filesystem corruption; they rebooted, the system came up, FS went into readonly mode, so they went back down for fsck. I don't know what FS they use.


• In October, an outage of about 30-60 minutes that apparently was due to load problems on the host. The control panel also was broken during this time. Apparently there is a reboot queue, and the system can only reboot one customer's VPS at a time, and everybody wanted to reboot. But the UI was not really designed for this situation and presented very confusing status messages.


• In November, a kernel panic caused an outage of about 60 minutes.


• Various other outages that were resolved fast enough that I never emailed them about it.

They have generally responded to support requests in a reasonable amount of time, and support has been approximately as helpful as I'd expect.

Overall, there've been a few issues but, aside from that 8-hour outage in July, nothing especially remarkable.

Automated Tools

VPSLink has a "control panel" where you can reboot, start, or stop your virtual machine. You can see how much bandwidth you've used in a month, your IPs, and billing information.

You can also create support requests and view the status of support requests there. You can also view all correspondence on a given ticket, and add new correspondence to it -- a nice touch that's useful if your email is down because your VPS is down.

The reboot/start/stop facility didn't work during one outage, though.

Resources

The 20GB of disk space is nice to have, though I never used it all. No complaints there.

But the memory setup is rather strange. This may be because VPSLink is using OpenVZ instead of its more popular (and featureful) commercial counterpart Virtuozzo, or something such as Xen.

Those that have used OpenVZ/Virtuozzo know there is a /proc/user_beancounters file in the virtual environment that reports on the limits of resources allocated to your virtual server. VZ lets the server admins regulate the amount of resident RAM, swap, inodes, pending IP connections, amount of virtual RAM, etc, etc. About 3 dozen items in total.

Unlike some companies like JohnCompanies, VPSLink was not willing to make any adjustments to this file for me. For instance, my mail server may need more simultaneous open files than they have by default, but they wouldn't work with me to make reasonable adjustments.

But the larger problem was with regard to RAM. This was particularly annoying. VPSLink does not permit any access to swap, so the 512MB is what you get. But tools like top show the entire memory allocation on the host, and are mostly useless in tracking down your own usage.

You can look at the privvmpages entry in /proc/user_beancounters to get an idea of your current usage, but that's it. There is a script on their wiki that will turn this into a more useful number, but again, it's not the most helpful.

The minute you try to allocate anything past 512MB, your processes start getting killed. According to /proc/user_beancounters, even though my system normally hovers around 70% of that 512MB allocated, I've had 290,567 instances where a process has been refused its request to allocate memory since the last reboot. Such instances usually cause a process to crash.

Other Virtuozzo companies like JohnCompanies will give you "burstable RAM", so if others aren't using their full RAM allocation at the moment that your machine goes over your regular limit, you can go over it to a certain extent. That was very effective at preventing crashes during times of higher than usual memory usage, and I never had trouble with this at JohnCompanies.

I've had a lot of trouble with VPSLink because of these hard, no-exceptions limits. Getting hit by the Google bot at the same time as the MSN bot could raise memory usage enough that processes would start getting killed. Depending on which process it is, it could take down cron, apache, the mail server, whatever. And there is no log of which processes die because of this.

In normal circumstances, this wouldn't pose even a noticeable impact to a server; inactive bits could be swapped out, etc.

I am also suspicious of exactly how OpenVZ calculates memory usage. Since moving to a physical Linux box, my memory usage seems to be much lower than the privvmpages would seem to indicate, even though it's running the exact same code.

So I had some outages on my server that were caused by OpenVZ memory limits, which didn't get listed in the overall outages above.

This problem is the #1 reason I'm leaving VPSLink.

Performance

Overall performance has been acceptable. The CPU speed appears to be reasonable and about as expected.

The disk performance has been more problematic, however. It tends to be rather slow. There have been times when I can type "ls" in a directory with about 10 files and it takes 5-10 seconds to respond. And I wasn't even using "-l".

Now that sort of thing is certainly the exception. But it makes databases -- and websites that rely on databases -- very slow.

The performance measurements over at RealMetrics also show VPSLink as being at the bottom of the pack for disk performance.

Overall

VPSLink is a reasonable value, and if monthly cost is important to you, probably a good choice. Don't expect it to be spotless, though. I would call the overall experience pretty average. Nothing too spectacular in either direction in any respect.