So far the server is running smoothly without any problem except a particular instance. For the first few of days there was nearly no activity in the server. After two days, I got couple of alert mails from linode.

Linode Alert – disk io rate – tamilsweet (linode20561)
Your Linode, tamilsweet, has exceeded the notification threshold (300) for disk io rate by averaging 450.13 for the last 2 hours.

Linode Alert – CPU Usage – tamilsweet (linode20561)
Your Linode, tamilsweet, has exceeded the notification threshold (40) for CPU Usage by averaging 99.7% for the last 2 hours.

A little panic peeped in! And the fact that I haven’t setup any security, flashed a second. I logged into the server immediately and checked the last login details to see if someone else gained access to the server. I just used the unix command last. Everything looked fine and logs only from my system – All IPs from BSNL, my BroadBand provider. Then I scrolled back my thoughts and recalled what I did earlier.

I had installed e107 – content management system. I wrote a WordPress plugin and the client needed e107 plugin with same features. So, I downloaded the e107 and installed it and it took about 15 mins. I reviewed few of the existing e107 plugins. This happened couple of hours before I got those alert mails.

I checked the CPU usage using top and MySQL was consuming nearly 100% CPU.  Since, the server was idle with nearly no traffic, I just restarted the MySQL server and that brought down the CPU usage to normal. So, its obviously some issue with e107 script and I didn’t had much time or any purpose to find the issue with the script. I haven’t uninstalled the script yet and it still can be found @ http://www.tamilg.in/demo/e107/

Baring this small instance the server is running smoothly. This Linode VPS instance currently have two live sites, obviously this site – http://www.tamilg.in/ and a fresh blog of my friend Gayathri – http://www.gayathri-frenzy.com/

The traffic is not huge enough to really find the performance of the server. The maximum page view per day so far is little over 1600 recorded last Wednesday – 20 May. I hardly imagined 1000+ visits per day within just a month and that was mainly because of posts on DLF IPL 2009. The linode manager has performance graphs available for last 24 hrs, last 30 days and for each month.

Here is the graphs for the past 30 days. i.e from 23rd April – 22nd May.

Linode VPS Instance – CPU Usage graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - CPU Usage for last 30 days

The CPU usage is nearly zero, except for the little spike caused by e107 as explained earlier in this post.

Linode VPS Instance – Traffic graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - Server Traffic for last 30 days

The traffic was considerably increase last week crossing 1000 visits per day and hence the little peaks at the end of the month/graph.

Linode VPS Instance – I/O rate graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - IO rate for last 30 days

The I/O rate very similar to traffic graph, just reflecting the traffic.

All in all – So far so good!

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

I downloaded the tar ball of latest version i.e. WordPress 2.7.1 from http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Extracted it to …./tamilg.in/public/

Then created database and user for WordPress in MySQL command line.

–Create database
CREATE DATABASE database_name;

–Create user  (Optional)
CREATE USER ‘username’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

–Grant permission to user on that database
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO ‘username’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Then copied wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and updated DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_HOST. Added some random characters to AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY and NONCE_KEY.

Now opened the page http://tamilg.in/ in the browser and it asked for the Blog Title and Email Id. Clicked on the Install WordPress button and got the admin password.

The first step I always follow is to login to the WordPress Dashboard and change the password to something easy to remember.

Now that the basic installtion is complete. Next step is to upload/activate necessary plugins for a standard blog. This includes All-in-One SEO, Google Analytics, XML-Sitemap and Share/Save Buttons. I’m yet to API key for Akismet – TODO task pending!!!

I downloaded the Fusion theme from WordPress Theme repository and extracted to the theme folder and activated it.

Last step??? Started blogging!!!

Just thought i could list down the steps, so that it could be helpful for someone else and may be to myself later .

I used articles by Victor Kane and Jeff Beeman as a guidance for setting up the server.  (Links to their articles can be found in the references list).

Signup & steps performed in Linode Manager

Signed up for Linode 360. Before signing up searched for coupon code in google but could only get some expired ones .

Immediately after signup, I just logged into the Member’s area or Linode Manager. It asked me to select the geographical location of the server. They have 4 different options

• Newark, NJ, USA
• Atlanta, GA, USA
• Dallas, TX, USA
• Fremont, CA, USA

I selected Fremont, CA, USA, as its closer to India, among the above four.

The Member’s area is very user friendly. I have used Slicehost earlier, but linode has better Membership area. Why Linode? Wait for few more days to see my views on why I prefered Linode over Slicehost.

Linode Distro Wizard.

Linode has Distro Wizard to assist setting up the server.

The first step is to select the OS and they have a big list of options to select from. I decide to select latest version of Ubuntu as I’m used to the Ubuntu environment. They had two options Ubuntu 8.10 – 64bit and Ubuntu 8.10 – 32 bit. Skimming through the Linode community, I found that there is no real advantage using 64bit unless there is specific requirement. So, I selected Ubuntu 8.10 32bit.

Selecting Disk Image and Swap Image size

Now next step is to select the disk space and swap space. I selected 512swap space and used remaining space to create image. The Linode 360 plan comes with 12GB disk space and I dont really expect to run out of space at least in the near future, so decide to have swap space little larger. Then typed in the root password and created the image.

The image was ready in about 15secs and I logged into the server using ip which is available in the network tab in the Member’s area.

Steps performed in server console

I logged into the server using SSH from my Linux machine.

update & upgrade

Now I did apt-get update and upgrade.

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

At this stage I got lots of warnings like

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = (unset)
are supported and installed on your system.

I generally don’t ignore warnings, but since the upgrade was successful, I just ignored it.

Setting hostname

/bin/hostname tamilg.in
echo tamilg.in > /etc/hostname

Be careful! The second line has /etc/ not /bin/

I just overlooked this and end up corrupting the /bin/hostname file. lol….. I couldn’t find a way to restore the corrupt file. Also, ubuntu.com or any of its  mirror doesn’t seem to have files in extracted state. They just has the iso image !? Not sure!. I had little time and so deleted the whole image from Member’s area and reinstalled everything. This time I was careful!  – don’t repeat mistakes )

Should the hostname necessarily be a valid domain name!? Yes, says Wikipedia – Hostname.

Now a rebooted the server from the Member’s area. Just had to click a “Reboot” button.

Installing Vim – Vi Imporved.

Vi editor comes with default Ubuntu installation. But I’m used to Vi Imporved and its really difficult to use basic Vi editor if you are not used to it. I used

apt-get install vim

Now again got those warning message but this time installation failed!!! So, I had to fix the warnings now! I fixed it after 2hours of struggle as I couldn’t find the proper solution to fix this.

The issue was because the folder/usr/lib/locale/ doesn’t had the needed language files. Users in some forums suggested to do

locale-gen
dpkg-reconfigure locales
apt-get install –reinstall language-pack-en

But those weren’t sufficient to fix the issue. Finally fixed the issue by adding a symbolic link to language file.

cd /usr/lib/locale
sudo ln -s es_ES.utf8 es_ES

Now used apt-get install vim and the installation was successful.

Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP

I just followed the instruction of Jeff Beeman.

# Apache2
apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libexpat1 ssl-cert

# MySQL
apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev

It asked if I want to set password for root user and I typed in the one easier for me to remember!

# PHP
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-mysql php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

Now restarted the apache server using the command

apache2ctl restart

Installing sendmail and configuring PHP to use it for sending mails

apt-get install sendmail

Opened /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and updated the sendmail path.

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t

Subversion and Apache modules

I use subversion for version control of my project, however small they be. So, I installed it in the server.

apt-get install subversion

Enabled deflate, expires and cache modules for Apache2. These modules are necessary to get the site better optimized for performance and learnt it from the usage of YSlow Firefox plugin to optimize Snesclassics.com. I’m the server administrator for the site snesclassics.com. If not now in future these module could be handy and so I decide to enable them.

a2enmod deflate
a2enmod expires
a2enmod cache

Now basic setup is complete and the server is ready to go live!!!. (I’m yet to configure the firewall and secure the server, just hoping that no one would waste their time hacking a nearly empty server ).

Setting up site(s) in server

My site was down from 6th April 09. The site was hosted in Dreamhost (shared) account of BambeeQ.

Updating DNS to serve tamilg.in from Linode

Now I added tamilg.in from DNS Manager tab of Linode Manager – Add a new domain zone. Then updated the nameserver of the domain in my domain registrar admin page to

ns1.linode.com & ns2.linode.com

I waited for about an hour for DNS propagation. Mean while I added the Virtualhost in the server.

Adding Virtualhost

The general practice is to put the sites in folder /var/www/.

But I used to a different practice(from the usage of slicehost). i.e. Using a separate user for hosting sites and having the sites in /home/<website user>/public_html/

I created user websites for this purpose. The directory structure for the site tamilg.in is

/home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/
../tamilg.in/
          |-/public/
          |-/private/
          |-/backup/
          |-/logs/

The folder names should clearly suggest their usage. For testing created a simple index.php file under /home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/public/.

Now, created the file tamilg.in under /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Content of tamilg.in & is self explanatory.

<VirtualHost *:80>

  # Admin email, Server Name (domain name) and any aliases
  ServerAdmin tamil@bambeeq.com
  ServerName  www.tamilg.in
  ServerAlias tamilg.in

  ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/cgi-bin/

  # Index file and Document Root (where the public files are located)
  DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
  DocumentRoot /home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/public/

  # Custom log file locations
  ErrorLog  /home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/logs/error.log
  CustomLog /home/websites/public_html/tamilg.in/logs/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Now that virtual host settings are ready, enable the site tamilg.in using the command

a2ensite tamilg.in

restart the apache server

apache2ctl restart

Initally I didn’t get the test page when I viewed http://tamilg.in/. The reason was the delay in DNS propagation.

After sometime, I got the test page loaded!!! Hurry!!!

Yet to do!

I got the site running from my Linode instance, but still there are few things left for me to do asap. I’m yet to secure the server by setting up firewall and have to disable root login to the server.

What next?

Then I installed WordPress and setup this site! . So, that gives me subject for the next post!

Huge post! I hope should be useful!!!

References:

1. Google Google Google!!! Find anything you want – Google
2. Victor Kane’s – VPS! Getting Drupal up and running on a linode
3. Jeff Beeman’s – Just got rolling with a VPS on Linode (Part 1)