Policy on VPS Kernel Upgrades; Merits of Fedora Core 2

[Jeff Mincey]

I wish to inquire if Peter, his staff, or his customers could weigh in on the merits of Fedora Core 2 vis-a-vis Core 1 and whether the differences are compelling enough to justify an upgrade (and whether this version has been thoroughly tested in the field yet). Do you recommend I go with Core 2?

Also, I would like to know whether Rimuhosting thinks it advisable that its customers upgrade their VPS's to the same kernel version to which it upgrades the server host as well. Are the security implications equivalent?

I assume that we customers are NOT able to perform low-level upgrades to our VPS's (and certainly this would include the kernel), and if this is true, then what recourse do we have if we feel a kernel upgrade is called for? What level of support from Rimuhosting is included as part of the monthly service?

For example, is it spelled out in a contract or SLA that within one year a certain tier of service (A, B, or C) includes one kernel upgrade or even the option of a wholesale change from one OS to another -- after which any further requests for such major upgrades (within the same year) would carry an additional charge?

For my part -- and especially in regard to the more volatile Fedora platform -- I don't think it reasonable to insist that Rimuhosting jump at every request to install each incremental update available; nevertheless, I wonder what the threshold of service is and precisely what we can expect as a standard part of our package. (I'm quite content to be told that at this point in Rimuhosting's lifespan there is no policy spelled out on this score and that the staff is flexible and will do its best to accommodate any _reasonable_ customer request.)

I'm sorry if this matter is detailed in anr SLA and I've simply missed it; but I raise these questions in light of the recent notice Peter has sent out to some customers that host32 (in the Dallas collocation center) will be undergoing a kernel upgrade as a result of vulnerabilities in earlier revs. And of course this provokes the question in my mind about vulnerabilities in the earlier revs of the VPS kernels as well.

[arthur]

Hi Jeff, I have asked Peter before to do a kernel upgrade on my VPS's and it has been carried out without any problems. I 'think' that the opinion is that if there is stable kernel upgrade available and Rimu hosting is confident/happy with it, then any reasonable request to do so will be okay. I 'think' that if you wanted to change to a different O.S then you might need to order another system and then change over because of the way their system and IP addresses are, but no doubt Rimu would advise more on that. From a security point of view, in my opinion if you are doing regular upgrades via apt-get or equivelent then there should not be a problem with that anyway unless it is something really major that can only be done with a kernel upgrade. Also, something that I have noticed in the past when doing a kernel upgrade is that once done it can actually 'upset' any software etc that you have installed on the VPS. So you would really need to weigh up the pros and cons of doing an upgrade.
Hope that help, kind regards, Arthur

[retep]

Hi guys.

Kernel Upgrades
Generally I'll put out a new kernel when a new one comes out, or if someone specifically asks for a particular version. We've been known to compile in different kernel options requested by customers. To the point where I think we have about 99.5% of all the options people seem to need.

We may consider custom patches to the kernel. But for security, and quality reasons that's not really something we've done before.

In general: make a reasonable request, we'll try to respond in a reasonable way.

After we build a new kernel we'll typically put it on all our host servers. And mark it as the current/default kernel. The next time you restart your VPS from the http://rimuhosting.com/cp control panel it will come up with that kernel automatically. (You will stick with the 2.4 branch or 2.6 branch - you won't switch between those by doing a reboot).

2.6 Kernels
FC2 is the popular distro that supports the 2.6 kernel 'out of the box'. Though it seems to work just fine on a 2.4 kernel as well (as least no glaring problems).

We've been using 2.6 kernels on all of our VPS distros for a few months now. VPSs setup up since April or May are "2.6 ready". The 2.6 VPS kernel has been working well for most things. However, we've noticed the odd Java and named crash which seems to occur when running on a 2.6 kernel. I'm not sure what's going on there (I suspect something to do with glibc/threading for Java and new socket function call signatures for named).

Consequently, 2.6 is fine if you want to run it. But by default we are mostly setting people up with 2.4 kernels.

Fedora Core
The Fedora distros are good if you are after a cutting edge distro. With frequent changes and all the new doo-hickeys. I just put it on a new PC I have at home. And it seems to be fine. I'm finding that I need to tweak a few things and download my own favorite programs, etc.

I don't really recommend Fedora if you're hosting though. Particularly if you are hosting for other people. Since the distro is going to be frequently updated and that means frequent changes (aka problems).

You can go from FC1 to FC2 yourself. It's just a matter of updating your /etc/apt/sources.list, doing an apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. Google may have a few more detailled howtos on this :) This process takes a few hours to download RPMs and install them.

Another option is for us to re-install your VPS, mount your old file system under something like /backups, and let you migrate data over to the new / file system and redo any custom configurations you have.

This is obviously a lot easier to do if you keep detailled notes of all the changes you make to your VPS. So that's a good habit to get into.

We typically charge a re-setup fee for doing the re-install.

You can use this same procedure to move from FC (or any other distro) to any other distro. I'd like to recommend our White Box Linux 3 distro. It's based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 source rpms - so it is quite stable and widely used. And it will be supported (erratta RPMs) for the next several years. So you won't be stuck on fedora core upgrade treadmill. (The same arguments apply for going to Debian, so if you're a Debian person that's a great option, too).

How's that sound?