[clug-talk] Online (Linux) PC?

[Dana Harding]

I have a VPS with canaca.ca, several exchanges with Canaca support and one 
exchange regarding Acanac's VoIP service.
Canaca and Acanac are closely related (in fact - the Acanac support ticket 
system has my original request for the Canaca VPS system in it,  but none of 
my communication with Canaca support since the original setup).

For what it's worth, and based on my experience:  stay away.

My experience(s):

Acanac:  I asked them about how many simultaneous channels are supported for 
their VoIP service.
My original thinking was to run an asterisk test system on a Canaca VPS, 
which is on the same network as the Acanac VoIP PSTN equipment ( = good 
quality connection).
The short answer:  "Maximum 2 channel, it is also prohabited to use this 
service for termination"
I explained that termination means to send calls over the PSTN,  and asked 
for clarification on that point because obviously their service includes the 
ability to call PSTN endpoints.
Never received a response, ticket closed.

Canaca:
- Took two weeks for some reverse DNS entries to be properly setup.     Not 
a DNS propagation issue - they couldn't figure out how to make their primary 
and secondary NS records sync.    Half of the lookups would resolve properly 
(when their primary NS was asked), and half of them would fail (when their 
secondary NS was asked).
- VPS was offline for a good portion of the day in early April with no 
notification,  explanation "Unfortunately the server is in FSCK mode (File 
System ChecK) and it will take 1~2 hours to come up."     -  This after it 
had already been down for at least several hours that I knew about, 
probably longer before I was aware of it.
-  extremely sluggish SSH response, http requests timing out,  machine 
randomly unresponsive beginning mid-December and carrying on for several 
months.    "Unfortunetly the server which your account "vps####" locates on 
, is one our newest and busiest servers and sometimes loads over than 
normal."
(They did offer to move my account to another server.)

General issues/observations that I do not have any solid references for:
- random periods of unavailability (usually very short - 5 to 10 minutes in 
duration)
- the assigned IP address has actually been bounced as unroutable during 
some of these outages
- a lot of extra 'stuff' running in the standard VPS image,  they are 
clearly geared for webhosting service with multiple domains.  Disk I/O 
performance is extremely poor when all of the VPSes hit the disk storage at 
the same time (the VPS image has the same times for all cronjobs).
- when I registered my domain through them, and didn't put up any DNS or 
HTTP servers right away they took the liberty in their nameservers of 
resolving my domain name to their own homepage.  Which - I just checked 
now - STILL isn't fixed...   I asked them to correct that when trying to 
setup reverse DNS entries in November.

Of course, and as always YMMV.

IIRC Canaca is running Virtuozzo.  In the future I think, at least for the 
type of things I want out of a VPS,  I will look for Xen instead of 
OpenVZ/Virtuozzo.   Harder to oversell, and harder for different VPS 
instances on the same host to interfere with eachother.