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01.1027WHY OpenSolaris VPS?

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Our OpenSolaris VPS service is a niche market. Majority of the market is based on Linux and Xen (or other virtualization). Entic.net runs OpenSolaris whole root zones, nothing else. Here are some of the reasons why you might want to consider an OpenSolaris VPS from Entic.net and why WE are offering this service.

1. OpenSolaris non-global zones share a single kernel in the host OS ("global zone"). Your VPS talks directly to the kernel, and the kernel to the hardware. There is no other middle virtualization layer, improving performance. There are no bottlenecks. It is as if running a single OS on a single piece of hardware.

2. The single kernel also means that we get to manage the kernel level software, when we do upgrades. You don't have to worry about security issues in the kernel. The user level - you get a choice, either we can manage it or leave it to you. This is why we sometimes call our OpenSolaris VPS servers semi-managed.

3. OpenSolaris kernel is based on Solaris and Solaris is one of the oldest Unix variants out there. This means a rock solid foundation for the OpenSolaris VPS zones.

4. Our hardware and software are from the same company, Sun (and now, Oracle). We believe Sun has made several advancements in the OS to work very well with the Sun hardware. Likewise, the hardware is tuned well to be run on Solaris and OpenSolaris. Think about this: The hardware and software talk to each other through drivers. These drivers (in part) are made by the same company. Linux is quite the opposite. There is clear coordination, in the end, resulting in superior performance and reliability in the OpenSolaris VPS we offer.

5. OpenSolaris is a modern OS. It takes the kernel, which is very advanced with a long history and mixes it with some new user land technologies that have been invented with OpenSolaris in the past few year(s). These newer technologies are iterations of "what's best" out in the Linux community.

6. The most advanced file system out there runs on our OpenSolaris VPS. We all know this because literally all other companies out there are copying it. This of course, is ZFS. ZFS is what enables us to offer FREE disk space on our OpenSolaris VPS plans. It also makes it so you have very reliable service and allows for easy backups and restores (through snapshots).

There you have it. A quick run down of all the benefits. This is why we firmly believe that Entic.net's OpenSolaris VPS offering is the best platform for all your web site and critical hosting needs. Reliability. Stability. Performance. This is why we continue to offer OpenSolaris VPS servers.

01.1016Taking DNS for granted (EveryDNS outage)

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Today, we've had a fairly large DNS outage. As some of you might be aware of, we host our DNS over at EveryDNS.com. It was free (well, we donated, and have supported it's cause through advertising on their site). It has served fairly well for the last several years, with only a few occasional DoS attacks.

Our LDAP address book (LDAPBook), mail and web site services were down. No doubt there would've been some access issues to our OpenSolaris VPS servers. Some of our customer's websites who also use EveryDNS were down.

We've taken DNS for granted.

One of the main reasons we've outsourced DNS is that we did not want to manage yet another service in-house. This is one of those things better left outsourced, leaving us free to concentrate on our core competencies - LDAP and OpenSolaris VPS.

We're investigating our options. We are considering using DynDNS, but one thing bothers us. This note on their web site:

Important note: Custom DNS cannot function if nameservers other than our nsX.mydyndns.org servers are listed in the delegation. Having "foreign" nameservers listed will prevent Custom DNS from initially activating, and later adding these extraneous nameservers will cause the service to deactivate within two weeks of the change. Please ensure only our five nameservers are listed in the delegation.

We do have secondary DNS servers in-house, and using that would be out of the question, since it seems we'll be forced to use only DynDNS name servers. This also brings up a point of what happens if DynDNS is DDoS attacked, since we'll be locked with one provider. However, DynDNS seems much more active in the DNS community (more than EveryDNS seems to have been), and they have real active support, which EveryDNS lacked. The pricing also seem to be quite high, we have over 30 domains (of which 10 are critical to our business) with EveryDNS and $30/year is about $900. DynDNS did offer to host our EveryDNS domains for free, for one year. But, after?

It's time to pick a provider that is flexible, and possibly not so expensive. We haven't ruled out DynDNS, but we haven't also jumped into the boat yet. We've taken DNS for granted, when DNS should be the most important infrastructure service. We'll change that...

zerigo.com looks interesting.

12.092225% off on OpenSolaris VPS. 2009 Christmas Special!

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Use the code "promo09" when checking out with Google Checkout. If you would like to pay through PayPal, we can offer the same coupon, but please contact us.

The 25% off is for the life of the account, so don't miss out on this opportunity to try out Entic.net's very fast and reliable OpenSolaris VPS servers (with a 99.99% uptime). SAS drives, dual power supplies, ZFS, DDR3 RAM, Intel Quad core.

Offer expires 12/31/2009.

12.0915OpenSolaris: Getting Disk Information

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Couple of nice commands, hope this helps someone.

root@vps2:/# /usr/sbin/cfgadm -al -s "select=type(disk),cols=ap_id:info"
Ap_Id                          Information
c0::dsk/c0t8d0                 LSILOGIC Logical Volume
c0::dsk/c0t15d0                SEAGATE ST914602SSUN146G
c0::dsk/c0t16d0                SEAGATE ST914602SSUN146G
c0::dsk/c0t18d0                HITACHI H101414SCSUN146G
c0::dsk/c0t19d0                HITACHI H101414SCSUN146G
root@vps2:/#

OR

root@vps1:~# /usr/sbin/raidctl -l 
Controller: 7
        Disk: 0.0.0
        Disk: 0.1.0
        Disk: 0.2.0
        Disk: 0.3.0
        Disk: 0.4.0
        Disk: 0.5.0
root@vps1:~# raidctl -l -g 0.2.0 7
Disk    Vendor   Product          Firmware      Capacity        Status  HSP
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0.2.0   SEAGATE  ST973401LSUN72G  0556          68.3G           GOOD    N/A
root@vps1:~#

You can of course get all of this using prtconf -v as well.

12.0904Google Domination, part 78: Public DNS

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Google mission is to organize the world's information. With Google now offering free public DNS service, this adds another set of tools for them to do just that and more.

What can Google learn from users of its DNS service?

Google would be able to figure out where you geographically are located at (even when you aren't using their Google search engine). How often you are on line. What web sites you visit. How often you visit them (e.g. would be able to tell how many people are using Hotmail or Yahoo mail instead of Gmail). Could it intentionally delay performance of lookups for say Hotmail?

Enter... Chrome OS

Now, let's assume that Google decides to use it's own DNS servers on these Chrome OS netbooks. Instant big brother monitoring capabilities for thousands and thousands of unsuspecting users. What do you guys think?

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