[erlang-questions] setting up a VPS for dedicated erlang server

Wed Mar 1 13:18:36 CET 2017

Joe

I agree that tools such as Puppet etc are a good way to go if you are operating at scale but there is an element of 400 page manual about Puppet and other tools.

It sounds to me as though your use-case would be well met with a simple shell script.  We have one that builds a CentOS dev environment (so yum rather than apt-get) that would be very easy to tailor.  More than happy to send you a copy, but there’s no rocket science to it!

One bit of advice if you do go down the “just a few shell scripts” route would be that you are well served to run all your sessions on the remote server in something like tmux or screen as that will allow your session to continue running should you have a temporary network break between you and the server.  It’s so very frustrating if you get most of the way through an instal to have it randomly killed in some arbitrary state if your local network glitches…

Adrian

> On 1 Mar 2017, at 11:41, Hugo Mills <hugo@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 12:28:20PM +0100, Joe Armstrong wrote:
>> Thanks for all your reply - I shall choose one of these and give it a try.
>> It seems there is a lot of choice.
>> 
>> Next problem.
>> 
>> Given that I have decided on a VPS and payed the $$$ - what I now have
>> is a raw machine and some kind of admin interface.
>> 
>> The admin interface will (I guess) allow choice of an OS and set up a few
>> basic things - at the end of which I assume I can do an SSH login and then
>> I'm free to play.
>> 
>> The next step is that I want to setup a whole load of things to make the machine
>> minimally useful - install Erlang etc.
>> 
>> All the installation commands and paths and environment variables and so
>> will depend upon my choice of OS - it would be nice to just run a local
>> script (on my machine at home) that automates as much as possible of this.
>> 
>> But what I'd prefer to do is abstract away from the package manager and say
>> Locally
>> 
>>    $ remote_install <my VPS> erlang
>> 
>> If my remote machine was a linux machine this might cause an 'apt get command'
>> to be issued remotely - if the remote machine was windows it would do
>> a chocolatey command - it it were a mac it would do a brew command
>> 
>> Is there anything remotely like this???
>> 
>> Has anybody any advice on the best way to proceed. Or do I have to write
>> a long 'rsh' script :-(
>> 
>> (And no I'm not looking for an expensive tool that does *everything* and has
>> a 400 page manual - just something simple)
> 
>   If you intend having a small number of choices for the whole system
> (i.e. only one Ubuntu configuration, only one Windows configuration,
> only one Fedora configuration), and simply want to be able to deploy
> that configuration repeatedly, then many VM providers will give you
> the ability to build deployment images.
> 
>   If you want more flexibility (i.e. you might want an Ubuntu
> configuration with Postgres installed one time, and one with RabbitMQ
> installed a second time), then you're looking more into the area of
> configuration management systems like Puppet or Chef or Ansible. I use
> Puppet -- it's a pain in the arse, but that's more to do with (a) the
> problem space: completely automating an installation and site-specific
> configuration for a bunch of arbitrary packages takes time and effort,
> and (b) the fact that I'm not really a practised sysadmin and don't
> much enjoy it. For simple things (installing packages, or managing
> basic configs of popular and well-known packages like Apache or
> Postgres), Puppet is pretty straightforward, and you can get
> _something_ working quickly. It's probably no more effort in the long
> term than writing and maintaining a bunch of complicated shell
> scripts, and ultimately more reliable.
> 
>   Hugo.
> 
>> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED <mailto:erlang@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Hugo Mills <hugo@REDACTED <mailto:hugo@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 10:24:39AM +0000, Igor Clark wrote:
>>>>> Bit late to this party but I really like https://www.scaleway.com/ <https://www.scaleway.com/> -
>>>>> they're European (Paris/Amsterdam), and they provide cheap,
>>>>> decent-spec VPSs, as well as their "Bare metal" range which is
>>>>> own-design, custom-build, multi-tenant hardware. I use one with
>>>>> 4-core/8GB/50GBSSD for €11.99/month. And you get unmetered bandwidth
>>>>> at a decent fixed rate (300mbps on my package), so you don't get
>>>>> out-of-control bandwidth charge horror stories. And no, I don't work
>>>>> there, I just think they're really good :-)
>>>> 
>>>>   I'll second Scaleway. It's Just Worked for me.
>>>> 
>>>>   The other recommendation I've got is a small company called Bitfolk
>>>> (http://bitfolk.com <http://bitfolk.com/>). More expensive than many of the larger
>>>> operators, but the quality of the support is superb. (Disclaimer: I've
>>>> known the owner of the company for many years; I own two Bitfolk VMs
>>>> and manage a third).
>>>> 
>>>>   Hugo.
>>>> 
>>>>> On 28/02/2017 23:52, Nathaniel Waisbrot wrote:
>>>>>>> In my experience cheap VPS services tend to be flaky. Amazon offers EC2 instance for free for one year. I doubt you can get a more reliable setup for the price.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The free tier is nice if you're interested in getting into Amazon (it's a frequently requested resume item). But I used the "free" tier, thought I was being careful, and got slapped with $60 in charges from network traffic before I could shut things down. There is no way to tell Amazon "I would rather go offline than pay $x", so a misconfigured cron job or traffic spike (DDoS?) that happens while you're asleep is basically guaranteed to cost you.
>>>>>> 
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>>>>> 
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>>>> 
> 
> -- 
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