[Catalyst] Requirements for Catalyst

[bill hauck]

--- On Sun, 2/22/09, Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> wrote:

> Slicehost does have one killer feature that Lindoe
> doesn't -- nightly,
> weekly, and on-demand full-system backups.  This saved my
> life when I
> upgraded Debian Stable last weekend and it went horribly
> wrong due to
> the crappy version of Xen they are using.  One click, and I
> was back to
> my old setup, with maybe a few lost mail messages.
> 
> OTOH, if they didn't suck, I wouldn't have needed
> the backups.

Linode said they're planning to add backups.  Also, depending on how you allocate your disk you can clone your system partition to your free space before making changes.  The 360 plan gives 12GB storage.  I have a Linode 360 and broke it up with 3GB "storage" for downloaded source, a 256MB swap, and two 4516 MB "system image" partitions.  I use one as a current production, the other is my backup.


> Anyway, you need sysadmin experience if you are going to
> use a VPS.  You
> start with a Linux system with *nothing* installed.  You
> log in through
> a "console", install your text editor (mg), sshd,
> and sudo, and then go
> from there.

I'm running Slackware 12 on my Linode.  The system image they give you doesn't have any development utilities (no gcc, glibc, perl, etc.), no database or webserver, or anything.  You really do need to know how to add packages to your system, patch it, etc.  Linode says they're community is a great learning environment, but I've not used it so I can't really comment.

I've never used Slicehost, but Linode gives you more bandwidth (200GB), storage (12GB), and RAM (360MB) for $19.95 a month.

I'd suggest getting a month with Linode and seeing how you like it.