Lockup issues aside, I found that working with the LAMP Ubuntu Hardy appliance from Turnkey at VPS.NET very good. However, I believe they left out a few things I would consider key essentials.
It’s a LAMP server. I have yet to configure a website that didn’t need to send mail of some kind. Even if you aren’t going to receive mail, you still need to do things like send email to the admin if there are issues. There was absolutely no mail installed on this appliance. Ok, there are variants on the MTA/SMTP front so I can maybe understand why this was missing…. but still, it was a LOT of work to get postfix/spamassassin/courier working. Would be nice if that was part of the package, ready to configure.
The install of VI/VIM was braindamaged (i.e. vim-tiny). You can’t properly edit with putty with that install. Backspace keys/arrow keys, none of it works properly in insert mode without a full vim install. However, until I did an apt-get update on the VPS.NET version of the appliance, I couldn’t get apt-get to find the right package. Though the Turnkey vmware appliance also lacked the full VIM install, I didn’t have to do an update to get the full version of vim-common vim-runtime, etc…
There were NO dns tools. I had to apt-get dnsutils. I couldn’t even run a dig or nslookup. To me, that’s just basic and should be there in a LAMP server.
Other than that, having PHP, Apache, Webadmin and PhpMyAdmin up and running was very handy, though on the Webadmin front, I seldom use it. I’m a command-line kinda girl. PhpMyAdmin is a nice tool – I’ve only used MySQLFront (which is no longer supported), so I was pleased with the features of PhpMyAdmin and grateful that it was already installed and ready to go.
We are watching the VPS closely now. It hung earlier today, but not with BUG messages in the syslog, so it may have been a networking issue. VPS.NET has offered to set me up with a new VPS on a 64-bit raw ubuntu install. I’m avoiding that at all costs. Quite frankly, if I have to go that route, and go through all that trouble, I might as well just install on my own server, and put the new server in place of my old NT box out at my little ISP here in town. If we can’t get this ubuntu/Xen implementation working, what confidence can I have that a 64-bit ubuntu/Xen implementation is going to be any more stable?