[arch-general] VPS hosting with Arch

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:53, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 01:38, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 16:09, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi all!
>>>
>>> I am looking for hosting that support Arch.
>>> Most probably this will be a VPS hosting (because of price),
>>> so official Arch Linux support is required.
>
> [skipped]
>
>> I hope to get things ready for deployment around December-January.
>> Until then I'm close to start with VPSVille UK
>> and use its 8$ plan as a sandbox.
>> When demands for a hosting will rise I may move to Linode.
>
> So, here's my experience with VPSVille UK:

[skipped]

More experience:
* downloaded files from ftp.archlinux.org at ~40-70 MB/s
* the VPS is running under OpenVZ
* the control panel is primitive
* it is possible to do some advanced things with it though,
  like creating TAP/TUN or FUSE devices
* multiple backup snapshots are not possible
* only direct SSH connection is possible (i.e. no web terminal)
* no rescue environment available
* for some reason the time was broken even after I fixed rc.conf
  and rebooted, so I replaced /etc/localtime manually
  (cannot confirm if this works - see the end of the message)
* Arch Linux template is of bad quality:
  besides .pac* files in /etc I mentioned earlier it also has a typo
  in hosts.allow that results in ssh access denied after system update,
  and the worst - the local pacman database is broken
  (specifically libarchive and pacman package entries)
  and to update the system you have to temporary disable SyncFirst
  in pacman.conf otherwise pacman won't update itself
  due to false file conflicts (--force will have no effect due to SyncFirst);
  all this because it was updated from 0.8.

I've complained on the forums, will see if they will update the template
(obviously I've fixed the system, but it would be nice to have
a correctly built template for new installs so users won't have to spent
their time on fixing these problems).

And yesterday I started getting errors about inability to allocate PTY
when trying to login via ssh, so I cannot login anymore.
Though I'm not sure it the problem is on their side,
or it's somehow caused by Arch update (udev, maybe?).

Their support responds quickly though. I tried only forum so far,
now filed a ticket in their support system.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)