amuck-landowner

First foray into dedicated - additional considerations....

S

stim

New Member
Hi,

At this stage I'm fairly adept at setting-up and administering a VPS from scratch.

But now I've ordered one of the cheapo OVH dedicated servers and I'm wondering about what additional administration tasks I should explore.

For example, managing the hard disk. Can it/ should it be partitioned? How do I ensure that the disks are properly spun-down, etc. 

I will be using it as a secondary backup box and maybe some light scripting. Nothing too heavy. So I'd like to keep resource usage to a minimum where possible.

Any tips/pointers or recommended packages/services would be appreciated.

Cheers,

:)
 
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HalfEatenPie

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Honestly it's very similar to a VPS, except for the fact that OS Reinstall isn't really fast and (assuming the server you purchased doesn't have KVMoIP/IPMI/iDRAC) if you screw up you'd have to contact support directly to get it fixed.  

I mean technically we can get more into partitioning layouts and whatnot but that's being a bit nit picky in my opinion.  
 
wlanboy

wlanboy

Content Contributer
First of all ... if you do not need the resources stick to a vps. You rent a dedicated server to burn the resources and not to keep resource usage to a minimum.

If you want to have the challenge for minimum resources buy a Respberry Pi.

Back to topic - things you should do:

  1. Read over and understand your TOS and AUP
    OVH is very strickt at a lot of things. Read the TOS and AUP to ensure you don't mess up things.
  2. Read over and understand your support package
    You don't have any support - just on hardware failures
  3. Select proper template
    Depends on what you want to do and what distro you like. Debian 7 runs well.
  4. Proper partitioning
    Depends on how you want to run your services. I stick to "/", "/home" and "/var".
    "/" for the system
    "/home" for scripts (ruby/node.js) and backups
    "/var" for web (/var/www) and for MongoDB (/var/lib/mongodb)
 
S

stim

New Member
Thanks for the pointers...

wlanboy said:
First of all ... if you do not need the resources stick to a vps. You rent a dedicated server to burn the resources and not to keep resource usage to a minimum.

If you want to have the challenge for minimum resources buy a Respberry Pi.
Click to expand...
...I've yet to find a VPS that offers 500GB hard disk for 3euro/month ;)

Early days, early days...
 
tonysala87

tonysala87

New Member
Your drive will fail. Plan on it failing. Spinning up/down to save the drive is probably in vain. Just keep backups, practice your routine for restoring the data. Keep even more backups. 
 
concerto49

concerto49

New Member
Verified Provider
tonysala87 said:
Your drive will fail. Plan on it failing. Spinning up/down to save the drive is probably in vain. Just keep backups, practice your routine for restoring the data. Keep even more backups. 
Click to expand...
If you keep spinning the drive up/down (by shutting down and starting it up again constantly) it'd likely kill it faster.
 
ThePrimeHost

ThePrimeHost

New Member
Verified Provider
If you can get IPMI (Unlikely with the cheap-o deals, but possible I suppose) you can use that to remote manage and remote install your OS. That being said I believe OVH offers automated reinstalls.
 
splitice

splitice

Just a little bit crazy...
Verified Provider
Hard drives regularly die after being spun down from my experience. Had a server that didn't get rebooted in over 600 days, gave it a restart and 2/5 drives in the RAID-5 array failed to spin up.

So yeah, spinning up and down will most likely reduce the drives life even if only by one power cycle.
 
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