32MB.ORG: Articles

Quick VPS Configuration with Minstall

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:12:46 GMT

In need of an automated script for bootstraping your freshly installed VPS? Have a look at Minstall. Minstall is an easy configuration script to remove unwanted process from your VPS, it's a bash script written by a nice guy from KnightSwarm named Maxexlcoo. I've been using this script to configure some of my recent servers. It has NGINX, MySQL, Exim, and PHP bundled.

Backup 32MB.ORG to Dropbox

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:25:08 GMT

There are lots of backup method out there, one of my fav is backup my VPS to a free storage service from Dropbox. I'm using a script from Dave Hope, based on another script from Andrea Fabrizi. Run it as root, or you can automate it using Crontab. It looks like I have something to report about using pre tag here, meanwhile you can download the script here.

Save the script as DropboxBackup.sh chmod +x and run it as root. If you want to automate it, create new Crontab as follow:

$ crontab -e
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 0 1 * *       /bin/bash /path/to/DropboxBackup.sh

That will auto backup-ing your specified folder once in a month.

Building 32MB.ORG Pt. 3: Setting Up Virtual Host for Your Domain

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:05:51 GMT

Now we have a working web server with PHP-CGI and SQLite installed, and it's running pretty well with less than 20 MB RAM used. Don't know how to squeeze more RAM usage, but I think less than 32 MB is enough. We need to add a domain, so we can have a fully working blog. I don't think DNS server will fit this VPS, so I'm using another VPS as my DNS server and point the A record to my IP. Lighttpd supports both Name-based and IP-based virtual hosts. Here's how I add a virtual host to Lighttpd:

1. After login to your VPS and becoming root, create a directory for your domain. I'm using 32mb.org for example, so I created 32mb.

mkdir -p /home/lighttpd/32mb
mkdir -p /home/lighttpd/32mb/public

2. Setup a public directory owner to web server user, lighttpd or www-data.

chown lighttpd:lighttpd /home/lighttpd/32mb/public

3. In case you forgot, allow a web server user to access our logs.

chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/log/lighttpd

4. Open Lighttpd Configuration file.

nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

5. Add support for your domain, put it at the end of the file.

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)32mb.org$" {
server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/32mb/public"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/32mb/access.log"
server.error-handler-404 = "/e404.php"
}

That's means:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)32mb.org$" - It will match request for both www.32mb.org and 32mb.org
server.document-root = "/home/lighttpd/32mb/public" - Server document root. You must set ftp/ssh user home directory to this root only
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/32mb/access.log" - Server error log file
server.error-handler-404 = "/e404.php" - Web server error 404 handler file

6. Restart your web server.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

7. Remember to point your domain A record to your VPS IP. Test. 8. Done. Now we have a fully working domain pointed to our VPS.

Building 32MB.ORG Pt. 2: Installing Lighttpd, SQLite, and PHP

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 08:26:12 GMT

For Blite! to works, I need a web server, PHP, and SQLite. Choose Lighttpd (Lighty) for web server software, PHP 5.3 with CGI, SQLite ext. and Xmlprc so I can use Blogspam.net for spam protection. The "pstree" result look like this:

andri@32mb:~$ pstree
init-+-cron
     |-dropbear---dropbear---sh---pstree
     |-kthreadd/708---khelper/708
     |-lighttpd---php5-cgi---4*[php5-cgi]
     `-sendmail-mta

After preparing my new box, next step is installing SQLite:

apt-get install sqlite

then Lighttpd:

apt-get install lighttpd

install the PHP scripting language and its supporting files:

apt-get install php5-cgi php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

edit the php.ini file:

nano /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

scroll down through the text of the php.ini file until you come to a line beginning with cgi.fix_pathinfo (use ctrl+w for search), uncomment the line so it look like this:

; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI.  $
; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not $
; what PATH_INFO is.  For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs.  Se$
; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the spec.  A sett$
; of zero causes PHP to behave as before.  Default is 1.  You should fix your s$
; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED.
; http://php.net/cgi.fix-pathinfo
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Next step is add a user to the system which the Lighttpd server can use. This is performed as a standard UNIX useradd procedure as follows:

useradd -d /home/lighttpd -m -s /bin/bash lighttpd

now, open the lighttpd.conf configuration file:

nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Add mod_fastcgi and uncomment mod_rewrite in case we need it. File will look like this:

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
        "mod_rewrite",
        "mod_fastcgi",
)

server.document-root        = "/var/www"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "lighttpd"
server.groupname            = "lighttpd"

index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                                "index.htm", "default.htm",
                               " index.lighttpd.html" )

url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl"

dir-listing.encoding        = "utf-8"
server.dir-listing          = "enable"

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/x-javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((
"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi",
"socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-environment" => (
"PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
"PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "1000"
),
)))

Save ctrl+o and close ctrl+x, and then change the lighttpd log folder owner to lighttpd:

chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/log/lighttpd

check if Lighttpd process with pidof lighttpd, if a number, or series of numbers show up, then it means Lighttpd is currently running. In this case, restart Lighttpd for the new configurations to take effect:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

If Lighttpd isn't running already, start it by entering the following:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

point your browser to your VPS IP, see if its working.

That should be it, now we need a working domain for our blog id. Will talk about it on the next post.

Building 32MB.ORG Pt. 1: Preparing the Box

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 02:27:54 GMT

IPXCore doesn't provide a Debian 6 minimal install on their SolusVM control panel. So, I have to remove several process that considered "not-needed". After updating and upgrading, apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade and installing Nano, Localpurge and Dropbear apt-get -y install nano localepurge dropbear I removed following process:

/etc/init.d/saslauthd stop
/etc/init.d/apache2 stop
/etc/init.d/xinetd stop
/etc/init.d/samba stop
/etc/init.d/bind9 stop
/etc/init.d/ssh stop

and prevent them to run on restart/start-up:

update-rc.d saslauthd remove
update-rc.d apache2 remove
update-rc.d xinetd remove
update-rc.d samba remove
update-rc.d bind9 remove
update-rc.d ssh remove

Start Dropbear as a replacement for OpenSSH, make it running by default by changing its config:

nano /etc/default/dropbear

set NO_START=1 to NO_START=0 and add some config for security, change the port and prevent root login:

# disabled because OpenSSH is installed change to NO_START=0 to enable Dropbear
NO_START=1 ;change to 0 

# the TCP port that Dropbear listens on
DROPBEAR_PORT=22 ;change to whatever port you want

# any additional arguments for Dropbear
DROPBEAR_EXTRA_ARGS="" ;add -w to prevent root login

You can also replace Syslog by Syslog-ng:

/etc/init.d/syslog stop
update-rc.d syslog remove
apt-get install -y syslog-ng

After reboot you will have a box running by (not more than) 10MB RAM. Done for now, next post will be installing Lighttpd, PHP, and SQLite, and then Blite! itself.

Source

How does a 32MB look like: SecureDragon O32

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:10:42 GMT

Long before IPXCore publish their 32MB VPS offer, SecureDragon already offering VPS with 32MB of RAM. Myself finally bought this one yesterday, and here's few benchmark for you:

It has access to one CPU

root@32mb:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5355  @ 2.66GHz
stepping        : 11
cpu MHz         : 2660.029
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 4
apicid          : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5320.05
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

It has 32MB RAM that burstable up to 64MB

root@32mb:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        65536 kB
MemFree:         54276 kB
Buffers:             0 kB
Cached:              0 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:              0 kB
Inactive:            0 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:        65536 kB
LowFree:         54276 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:           0 kB
Mapped:              0 kB
Slab:                0 kB
PageTables:          0 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:         0 kB
Committed_AS:        0 kB
VmallocTotal:        0 kB
VmallocUsed:         0 kB
VmallocChunk:        0 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

root@32mb:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         65536      12124      53412          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      12124      53412
Swap:            0          0          0

It has 2GB Disk Space

root@32mb:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs            2.0G  478M  1.6G  24% /
tmpfs                  32M     0   32M   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                  32M     0   32M   0% /dev/shm

root@32mb:~# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/simfs           1048576   23535 1025041    3% /
tmpfs                   8192       3    8189    1% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                   8192       1    8191    1% /dev/shm

It has great IO Speed

root@32mb:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 7.05875 s, 152 MB/s

It has great Network Speed too

root@32mb:~# wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2012-06-29 15:54:52--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 23.1M/s   in 4.9s

2012-06-29 15:54:57 (20.5 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

Akamaras' Bench Result

root@32mb:~# sh bench.sh
CPU model :    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5355 @ 2.66GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2660.029 MHz
Total amount of ram : 64 MB
Total amount of swap : 0 MB
System uptime :   6 min,
Download speed : (6.69MB/s)
I/O speed : 144MB/s

Conclusion

Besides their greater IO and Network Speed, SecureDragon also provide 16 IPv6 and I can automatically setup RDNS via SolusVM control panel. With almost $2 difference from IPXCore's ($4.17/quarter), SecureDragon's supposed perform better indeed. Joe obviously prepared for this offer, another thing that make me happy is they are provide me a Debian 6 Minimal.

root@32mb:~# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.3  1.1   2024   724 ?        Ss   16:57   0:01 init [2]
root      1501  0.0  0.9   5364   620 ?        S    16:58   0:00 supervising sys
root      1502  0.0  3.4   5620  2288 ?        Ss   16:58   0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root      1524  0.0  1.1   2284   780 ?        Ss   16:58   0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
root      1531  0.0  1.4   5484   956 ?        Ss   16:58   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root      1546  0.0  1.3   2388   860 ?        Ss   16:58   0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
root      1588  0.0  4.5   8540  3004 ?        Ss   17:02   0:00 sshd: root@pts/
root      1590  0.0  2.4   2956  1636 pts/0    Ss   17:02   0:00 -bash
root      1639  0.0  1.4   2344   924 pts/0    R+   17:05   0:00 ps aux

How does a 32MB look like: IPXCore 32MB

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 03:35:52 GMT

Inspired by 96MB.com, I try to run a blog on a LEB (Low End Box), but instead of WordPress I use Blite! and instead of 96MB I use a 32MB. Bought the box from IPXCore's latest offer on LET. People said, that after few tweaks a 32MB will able to host a blog. Well, it does. Now, let's find out how does a 32MB look like:

It has access to 4 CPUs

root@32mb:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 3
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 65
model name      : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2216 HE
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 2400.591
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 1
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 3
initial apicid  : 3
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat                                                                              pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext                                                                              3dnow rep_good extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy
bogomips        : 4800.12
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

It has 32MB RAM and 32 vSwap

root@32mb:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:          32768 kB
MemFree:           20460 kB
Cached:             5468 kB
Active:             3516 kB
Inactive:           2468 kB
Active(anon):        148 kB
Inactive(anon):      368 kB
Active(file):       3368 kB
Inactive(file):     2100 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:         32768 kB
SwapFree:          22660 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:           516 kB
Shmem:                 0 kB
Slab:               6260 kB
SReclaimable:       3736 kB
SUnreclaim:         2524 kB

root@32mb:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            32         12         19          0          0          5
-/+ buffers/cache:          6         25
Swap:           32          9         22

It has 2 GB Disk Space

root@32mb:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs            2.0G  586M  1.5G  29% /
tmpfs                  16M     0   16M   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                  16M     0   16M   0% /dev/shm

root@32mb:~# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/simfs           1048576   28540 1020036    3% /
tmpfs                   4096       3    4093    1% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                   4096       1    4095    1% /dev/shm

It has good IO Speed

root@32mb:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.6154 s, 73.5 MB/s

It has good Network Speed too

root@32mb:~# wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2012-06-28 05:39:35--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 11.0M/s   in 9.2s

2012-06-28 05:39:44 (10.9 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

32mb.org

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:16:05 GMT

32mb.org is a blog running on Blite! and 32MB VPS with Squeeze OS and Lighty web server. Blite! written in PHP and using SQLite database, so it's quick, easy to use, light on server resources, and definitely fun!

Blite is available for free under a GPL license, you can download it here. Get the 32mb box for $1.5/quarter here.