Many people seem to use their linodes for blogging. But what else do you people use your linodes for?

I experiment with wikis (one of the wikis is for documentation for me and my other three co-workers), run a mailinglist for me and my neighbours, run a perlscript that sitescrapes a site once per day and stores the result in a mysqldb, and run smokeping to watch over my connection at home to see if and how long downtimes it has.

I have two linodes and run one as a development server and the other as the production one. So I can do all my experiments safely.

So.. what do you use your linode(s) for?

2D curve fitting and 3D surface fitting is the only use I make of http://zunzun.com

James

I use mine for a hosted Kerio MailServer I run for clients. Pretty slick.

An expensive shell account really.

I used a free service called metawire previously, and they deleted my account when I forgot to close screen.

Never found a shell provider I thought I could trust to provide a service with integrity and good customer service.

Uses:
- personal webhosting
- circumventing nazi university firewall
- rendering university recording of all sites accessed worthless (uni policy is along the lines of "you have no privacy, thus there can't be any violations of privacy")
- accessing a non-windows environment windows shops (eg: uni...)
- saves me running any servers on my weak ADSL home connection

Mine does mostly quite boring LAMP hosting: leedsrocksoc.co.uk and leeds.scifi.me.uk are both smallish (maybe 20 regular users) community sites for societies belonging to my university -- the Students Union provides web hosting through the university but can't work out why a society would need or want sql database access, and the university will only provide oracle as a database, complete with a massive price tag.

Then there's a few blogs, a bug tracker for the dev work I do, and a couple of my friends have an shell account and some webspace for tinkering with things.

_________________
Open Sorcery
http://technomancer.me.uk

http://www.panix.com/shell.html Panix Internet have been providing shell accounts since 1989 and are pretty good. $10/month (or $100/year pre-paid). NetBSD setup.

I prefer a virtual host (like linode or Panix v-colo) because it gives me more flexibility (my own SMTP server, UUCP-over-SSL, DNS etc etc etc).

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

I originally got my linode to run my own mail server: I wanted my own domain (so that changing ISPs wouldn't require an address change), and I've never had an ISP that didn't eventually screwup mail (well, Neosoft, before they sold out, was pretty good). So mail comes into the linode, and my home server UUCPs it periodically.

Of course, that means the occasional mail screwups are now *my* fault, but somehow that's better...

Also, a wordpress blog that only gets updated when I do something interesting (it's been more than a year, now). Gallery for my pictures and for my parents' pictures. A few Django apps for personal convenience.

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The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

-Expensive shell account for IRC access. Yay screen/irssi!
-Hosting four domains and varying subdomains
-E-mail for all of the above (+ webmail over SSL)
-MySQL database... but who doesn't? The difference with mine is that the root user is allowed access from anywhere, without a password... but it requires an X509 cert. Good times.
-My linode actually contains the raw files for my Certificate Authority... backed up, of course.
-OpenVPN access (on :53/udp, yay for walking around firewalls)
-IPSEC access
-DNS master for my domains, with key authentication allowing me to update my DNS from anywhere, securely
-File hosting
-Kerberos realm
-LDAP (coming soon!)
-PGP/GPG key backup

I like my crypto :)

kbrantley:

Do you know of any good guides for setting up OpenVPN and IPSEC? I tried a while back and wasn't able to get things properly working - one of the issues was my firewall configuration, though I know there were others.

Thanks.

--Xel

For OpenVPN, I used the HOWTO. http://openvpn.net/howto.html

For IPSEC, the lartc is amazing: http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.ipsec.html http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.ipsec.tunnel.html and http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.ipsec.tunnel.html

Note that lartc uses the KAME software for IPSEC, not the OpenSWAN software.

Firewall configuration? OpenVPN needs a single port (of your selection), tcp or udp. IPSEC needs 500/udp (but this can be changed if you really want to).

I am running:

1. game server growing in popularity
2. a dozen or so websites
3. email/webmail/filtering for half a dozen domains
4. DNS for all domains
5. asterisk for nearly free voip for my office
6. database for all data

In no particular order:

1. a shell account

2. a site to run some blogging software I'm writing in Python

3. a site to host a family photo album

4. a place to experiment with internet services without having to punch holes in my home firewall

So far I've been happy with the Linode experience.

document processing (cant say what) for fed gov agencies.

What's a 'fed gov'?

A Carnivore, of course ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29 )

_________________
Rgds

Stephen

(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)