Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

The Minimal Server

I was a sysad­min for a long time. I did that for mon­ey, so I nev­er re­al­ly want­ed to spend time do­ing the same thing in my own time, which lead to a se­vere case of cob­bler's chil­dren walk­ing bare­foot in my pri­vate serv­er.

So, to­day at lunch, I de­cid­ed to clean up my garbage. So this is what I end­ed up with, which is the min­i­mal serv­er that is good enough to be gen­er­al­ly use­ful for me.

Hosting

This is a cheap VPS pro­vid­ed by the nice folks at burst.net who are not giv­ing me any­thing to speak nice things about their ser­vice. How­ev­er, I will do it any­way:

  • Crazy cheap ($5.50 but I have a 20% dis­­­count for life)

  • Good amount of mon­th­­ly band­width

  • Lots of disk space

  • Good up­­­time

  • Fast net­­work

  • Very cheap

  • De­­cent per­­for­­mance

Distribution

I had Cen­tOS 5 in­stalled, and it stays. If burst ev­er starts of­fer­ing Ubun­tu Pre­cise, I may switch. Or, since this work­s, I may not.

What's good about Cen­tOS? It's sta­ble and bor­ing.

What's bad about Cen­tOS? It's too bor­ing. Lots of cool stuff just is­n't pack­aged.

Web Server

I need to serve a bunch of do­main­s, but I have a pe­cu­liar­i­ty: they are all stat­ic sites. I wan­t:

  • Low re­­source us­age

  • De­­cent per­­for­­mance (that most­­ly in­­­volves sup­­port­ing ranges and con­­tent ne­­go­ti­a­­tion)

  • Sta­ble

  • Sup­­port di­rec­­to­ry in­­dex­es

  • Easy con­­fig­u­ra­­tion

  • Vir­­tu­al do­­mains by name

Al­most any serv­er works well for this. Even Apache, ex­cept for the easy con­fig­u­ra­tion bit. I end­ed up with gatling be­cause it fits those cri­te­ria fair­ly well.

  • It us­es about 1.4MB of RAM , which is al­ways nice in a VPS

  • It's pret­­ty fast

  • Has not crashed in 2 hours?

  • Sup­­ports in­­dex­es

  • Here's the con­­fig­u­ra­­tion: "-c /s­rv/www -P 2M -d -v -p 80 -F -S" (yes, there is no con­­fig file at al­l)

  • Vir­­tu­al do­­mains are just fold­ers and sym­links in­­­side /s­rv/www which is the eas­i­est pos­sil­ble way to do it.

  • It sup­­ports re­­verse prox­­y­ing for when I want to try a python web app I am work­ing on.

Mail Server

No, I don't want a mail serv­er. I have gmail and/or a re­al mail serv­er for that. I want to get the mails from cron. For this, I used ssmtp and an ex­tra gmail ac­coun­t. It work­s, and here's the whole con­fig:

root=roberto.alsina@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthMethod=LOGIN
AuthUser=roberto.alsina.3@gmail.com
AuthPass=notputtingthetrueoneheredude

The best I can say about this con­fig­u­ra­tion is that it work­s, and does­n't in­volve run­ning a dae­mon.

Misc

For when I need to be in two places at the same time: Open­VPN rules, and there is no ar­gu­men­t. I have a squid run­ning oc­ca­sion­al­ly, and there is a Quas­sel core for IRC stuff. I in­stalled mosh to make ssh less painful, rsync han­dles file de­ploy­ment and back­up stor­age, cron sched­ules stuff, and that's it.

Status

Plen­ty of free RAM and CPU (yes, that's the full process list):

[root@burst1 ~]# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.1   2156   664 ?        Ss   22:01   0:00 init [3]
root      1135  0.0  0.1   2260   576 ?        S<s  22:01   0:00 /sbin/udevd -d
root      1518  0.0  0.1   1812   572 ?        Ss   22:01   0:00 syslogd -m 0
root      1594  0.0  0.1   7240  1032 ?        Ss   22:01   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root      1602  0.0  0.2   4492  1112 ?        Ss   22:01   0:00 crond
root      1630  0.0  0.1   5684   716 ?        Ss   22:01   0:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a pam -n 2
root      1631  0.0  0.0   5684   444 ?        S    22:01   0:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a pam -n 2
root      1636  0.0  0.2   3852  1372 ?        S    22:01   0:01 /opt/diet/bin/gatling -c /srv/www -P 2M -d -v -p 80 -F -S
root      1677  0.0  0.2   4284  1232 ?        Ss   22:02   0:00 SCREEN /root/quasselcore-static-0.7.1
root      1678  0.0  2.1  36688 11148 pts/0    Ssl+ 22:02   0:03 /root/quasselcore-static-0.7.1
root      3228  1.0  0.7  12916  4196 ?        Ss   23:28   0:13 mosh-server new -s -c 8
root      3229  0.0  0.3   3848  1588 pts/2    Ss   23:28   0:00 -bash
root      3275  0.0  0.1   2532   908 pts/2    R+   23:48   0:00 ps aux
[root@burst1 ~]# w
 23:49:03 up  1:47,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
root     pts/2    186.153.52.253   23:28    0.00s  0.01s  0.00s w
[root@burst1 ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        524800      49100     475700          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      49100     475700
Swap:            0          0          0

All things con­sid­ered, fair­ly hap­py with the re­sult.

edvm / 2012-08-07 20:25:

This is fuck1ng awsome!


Contents © 2000-2024 Roberto Alsina