From: Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy (grisha_at_ispol.com)
Date: Wed 04 May 2005 - 17:05:06 BST
On Wed, 4 May 2005, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> heh, how far is OpenVPS now? and what about it's 'current'
> targets/aims/whatever ...
>
> maybe you could give a short overview?
Well... targets/aims is a big question that I've been trying to answer for
a long time :-)
The idea is to provide the missing software between just bare Linux
VServer/utils and a hosting environment.
To put it in perspective - anyone who uses vserver is very likely to
create some sort of a "image". Of course not knowing what the ultimate
goal is there is no telling what that image might be becuase there is a
big difference between running a jailed sendmail, a honeypot or hosting a
VPS.
But once you define the context, which in this case it _is_ a VPS, then a
lot more becomes known - e.g. a VPS should probably include
hosting-relevant packages (e.g. apache), you can make a pretty good guess
at what services should be enabled, you can do little things like generate
an SSL cert, create a default user, fix up mail config, etc, etc.
>From the host perspective - VPS's need to be provisioned/stopped/deleted
fairly simply, they need to be backed up, you need to monitor resource
usage and make sure that things are up, there needs to be a mechanism for
keeping up to date with security updates, etc. It is also a given that you
would use quite a few of physical servers, and those would need to be
easily provisioned, monitored from a central place, etc.
That's in a nutshell what OpenVPS aims to do. It's actually a lot of
stuff, and it's not really easily "categorizable" as a "control panel" or
whatever (in fact, the CP functionality is quite limited at this point).
There is a status page that lists things that it already does reasonably
well:
http://www.openvps.org/Plone/about/status
The other aspect of this project that should be mentioned is how it is run
- rather than trying to make guesses as to what a hosting company would
need, we actually went ahead and started a hosting company (ok, it was
actually the other way around - first the company, then the project :)).
As far as I can tell, OpenHosting is the _only_ hosting company that
actually makes all (except for the billing stuff) of its software open
source and is proud of it, but this is kind of getting OT for this list.
OpenVPS is currently ASL licensed (this might change to GPL) and is all
Python/C - that's just my mod_python heritage.
Anyway - if this resonates with anyone on this list - and I _know_ that
there are lots of ISP/hosting people here, subscribe to the OpenVPS dev
list (http://openvps.org/mailman/listinfo/dev), we could certainly use a
lot of help :-)
Grisha
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