Well. It’s still fun the second time around when I moved hosting, but it wasn’t the same. 3^rd time? Hmm. By now I probably have set up 30+ virtual servers due to expansion or migration, and it feels a lot like work than fun. In the effort to possess the 3 great virtues of a programmer according to Larry Wall, laziness, impatience, and hubris, I decided to write some simple scripts to quickly get my low end virtual servers up running and configured in no time!

Here is one that I want to share today.

• Download lowend-debian.sh

Usage:

1. Buy a new low end VPS from any provider
2. Build a standard Debian 5 minimum install
3. Got the root password
4. ssh into your new low end box, and

   $ ssh root@my-new-box
   Linux lowendbox 2.6.18-blah #1 SMP Wed Aug 26 15:47:17 MSD 2009 i686
   ...
   Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
   permitted by applicable law.
   # wget -q http://www.lowendbox.com/scripts/lowend-debian.sh
   # bash ./lowend-debian.sh
   ...
   

What it does is:

• Remove rsyslogd (memory hog on OpenVZ system) and portmap (mostly useless).
• Run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to get the server up to date.
• Install and configure dash as /bin/sh.
• Install and configure inetutils-syslog as default system logger.
• Install and configure dropbear as OpenSSH replacement.

Once done, it should bring the memory usage to around 4-5MB on a 32bit Debian (where 2.8MB is from bash and dropbear that handles the SSH connection). It should also work on Ubuntu-based distributions (tested on a 64MB Ubuntu 9.04 VPS). Feel free to check the code to make sure I am not doing anything malicious like hijacking the server and install a ssh key or something :)