[clug-talk] Online (Linux) PC?

[Mark Carlson]

On 5/14/09, Dana Harding <dharding at nucleus.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, interesting.  I have not been looking for a VPS for a while,
since I don't think I can justify it for my purposes (personal web
page, and the odd other task.)

I wondered what it would be like to have a VPS on a machine with a
company that advertises that you can run torrents on it!  That just
has poor performance written all over it.

Still, I think it's neat to be marketing a VPS as an "Online PC" for
regular users.

-Mark C.