Hi there,
At present, I'm running 2 servers at home on a 2Mb AOL DSL connection running Gentoo Linux with UnrealIRCd, Anope Services, Apache2, PHP, MySQL. I've been recommended to Linode by a few of the guys on another IRC network and now I've taken a look through whats available, it looks very promising that I'm about to become a customer, however, I just want to ask a couple of questions before I make the leap.

I couldn't see if hosting/running IRCd's and related services was against ToS/AUP, so is the hosting of IRCd allowed with Linode? If so, I'm looking at ordering a Linode with Gentoo Linux running on it since I'm pretty well versed in using it. Gentoo Portage likes to compile everything from source as opposed to using the binary distributions of software. Because compiling can be pretty CPU intensive, would the Gentoo installs come with the GCC/C++ compilers? I ask this because UnrealIRCd/Anope require compiling from source and Gentoo Portage also compiles Apache/MySQL/PHP from source too and all these are services I plan to run.

I also plan to host more than 1 site on a Linode (No more than 5 though) so am I limited to how many domains the Linode can serve?

Many thanks for your time.

Anbraxas,

I don't know if running IRC is a violation of the TOS (though I would think it probably isn't), but I can tell you that I'm running Gentoo on my Linode, and compiling stuff isn't a problem (though it will be a bit slower than on a dedicated machine). There also isn't a limit to how many sites you can host ... I've currently got about 45 on mine.

Regards,
Jeremy

---
IntuiWORX - Intuitive, Innovative Software Development
http://www.intuiworx.com

You can basically run anything you want, as long as it doesn't spam or breach network security (such as flooding).

Also, these ports are blocked:
http://www.linode.com/products/faq.cfm?id=25

Other than that, the only limits are bandwidth transfer, disk space and CPU usage.

Please note that all you get is a basic installation of Linux (from a list of distributions - and yes, Gentoo is one of them). If you want Apache or anything else, you'll have to install them yourself. You also get console access through LISH.

I build binary packages at home, rsync them to my Linode and then install them using portage there. It's much quicker as you'll quickly hit the IO-limiter on you Linode if you compile there.

Andrew

FWIW, to my knowledge, I've never hit the IO limiter during compiles. For example, I'm about midway through compiling PHP right now, and there are a few sample outputs checking my io_status:

$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9613378 io_rate=2001 io_tokens=398311 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9614501 io_rate=201 io_tokens=399237 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9650090 io_rate=0 io_tokens=377471 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9678291 io_rate=11 io_tokens=387670 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9719862 io_rate=0 io_tokens=400000 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9745616 io_rate=0 io_tokens=400000 token_refill=512 token_max=400000
$ more /proc/io_status
io_count=9757283 io_rate=0 io_tokens=400000 token_refill=512 token_max=400000

The ones where I was below 400,000 are during the configure phase; once I got into the actual compile, I was back up to 400K, and haven't dropped below since in any of my random reads.

Thus far, to my knowledge, the only time I've hit the io limiter on my Linode is when I was copying a *large* (3 gb) amount of files from one partition to another.

On the other hand, compiling on a dedicated machine and then installing the binary packages on the Linode will certainly be faster ... but if you don't mind the slower compile, there's no reason to *not* do the compiles on your Linode if you don't have the luxury of another Gentoo box at your disposal to compile the binary packages.

_________________
IntuiWORX - Intuitive, Innovative Software Development
http://www.intuiworx.com

I run a similar setup on an 80, in addition to email/imap/pop3 and dns, and it runs fine. Only real difference is I ditched apache for lighttpd. If you take the time to optimize things you shouldn't have a problem.



This was one of the reasons I went with linode. I wanted a place that allowed IRC related stuff and this is by far the cheapest place with the best service that does. I was hesitant, still, thinking that a cheap place that allowed IRC stuff would be a prime home for kiddies and the target of DDoS attacks but that's not been the case at all.



This should not be a problem either. The only concern is how many hits you get, but again that's something that can be dealt with by tweaking the software.

My Linode 80 with an extra 20MB of RAM handles about 30,000 hits a day, most of which require a database hit, so it's possible to handle a fairly high load

Andrew