I consider installing a control panel to debian which is IspCP Omega. Do you advise me to install it or not? To a 256 MB VPS from Server Complete. I will use that vps for my main web sites.

Well. Don’t. No self-respecting low end admin would use a control panel to administer his/her elcheapo virtual server with limited memory. Actually I have never heard of IspCP Omega until today since I did most my admin on port 22, so I attempted to install it on one of my spare VPS. Not Server Complete one, but reasonably comparable.

Installing IspCP Omega is pretty trivial. You’ll find the doco for Ubuntu here, and for Debian here. Just make sure you have multiverse included in your /etc/apt/sources.list to get all the required packages. Took a while to make on this small VPS. After installation & restarting Apache, you should be able to access the control panel from the URL you specify during installation. It’s now running MySQL, Apache2 with worker MPM, PHP in FastCGI, Courier IMAP/POP3, Postfix with Postgrey + Policyd, Bind9, etc.

Yup. It’s all up and running with 256MB burstable memory. However,

• Need to turn off MySQL Innodb and tune courier authdaemon to start just 1 daemon to reduce memory usage.
• While it uses only 78MB committed memory, it allocates 186MB! That’s without any PHP FastCGI running. Which means it will hit my 256MB limit very soon when I have a few sites low traffic sites running. Server Complete allows also only 256MB burstable memory for their $5 VPS.
• I found IspCP a bit too complicated to host a few websites. It’s designed to run a shared hosting service so you get to define reseller, users, hosting plans, etc. For something simpler that just used by yourself to host a few websites, try Webmin/Virtualmin. Or learn to work on shell :)

Hopefully that helps.

Sorry for the insult, but one reader had issue with getting Debian 4 up and running. I suspected that might be a competence issue. Just to prove the point, I went ahead and ordered a 512MB VPS from 2HOST myself, and gave a try on getting Debian 4 Etch up and running.

Ordering

Ordered at 11:09am, and the activation email received at 10:08pm. 11 hours turn around — could be better but not bad. Debian 4 is not part of the ordering option so I opted for Debian 5. It does not really matter anyway as it will be scrapped.

Setting Up VPS in HyperVM

In the activation letter it contains the address to HyperVM and username+password to access it.

• Log into HyperVM with credential provided.
• Click on Rebuild
• Change “Ostemplate” to “debian-4.0-x86_64″
• Check “Confirm rebuild”
• Click on Update

Wait for a minute or two for Debian 5 to be zapped and Debian 4 to be installed on the Xen VPS.

Logging into VPS as Root

Problem with 2HOST’s Debian 4 template is that you cannot log into your VPS as root via SSH, because PermitRootLogin has been set to no. It’s good for security reason, but not that good for your VPS customers trying to set up a new VPS!

However HyperVM/Xen provides console access. In VM Home page,

• Click on “Console Access”
• An Java applet will start to log you into the console.
• Use your HyperVM credential to log in, and you’ll be dropped into a Bash prompt.
• Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and change PermitRootLogin to yes.
• Run /etc/init.d/ssh restart to use the new setting.

Now you can log into your VPS via regular SSH client as root.

Setting up Swap

I have also noted that swap was not enabled for Debian 4, even though /dev/sda2 is available as a swap partition.

# mkswap /dev/sda2
# swapon /dev/sda2
# echo '/dev/sda2 none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

Now you have a usable Debian 4 Etch VPS on x86_64 with 512MB memory and 1GB swap space!

Server Spec

To those who are interested.

• Kernel running 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen
• 8 CPU cores under /proc/cpuinfo — Intel Xeon E5420 @ 2.5Ghz

Cheers! Feel free to ask me any question in the comments.