[ILUG] Using a virtual server as a remote back up / mail server.

[Michael Conry]

Hi David,

On 7/21/05, David Jamison <david.jamison1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I have been toying with idea for some time now of setting up a virtual
> server to essentially store personal data and files
<snipped>
> Another use I could see for a virtual server is as a mail server so that
> not only could mail stay on the server but presumably I could access it
> easily from whereever I happen to be.  Im guessing I would need to move
> from my NTL mail account to having a domain of my own.
That's probably a good idea, but you can have your virtual server
running fetchmail to grab mail from the old NTL account too, so there
shouldn't be any disruption.
Plus, with your own domain, you can start doing things like
grey-listing and other more advanced spam filtering techniques that
have been mentioned lately (Rick Moen has further info on this on his
linuxmafia site).
 
> One company I had looked at was RedwoodVirtual
> http://www.redwoodvirtual.com/ but interestingly they say they are at
> full capacity at the moment. Anyone know of any contenders hopefully local?
This was discussed on-list not so long ago.  A couple of companies got plugged.
bytemark.co.uk are in the UK and offer virtual servers.  I signed up
with them myself and I haven't had any problems yet.  Others gave
positive feedback on this company too.
The other company I remember being plugged was Linode.com
http://www.linode.com/
They seem cheaper (USD19 vs. UKP15 per month for the basic version,
and giving 50Gb transfer  compared to 15Gb) and nobody slated them on
list (that I noticed)

> I have done some googling on this but most of the documentation seems to
> be around building rather than configuring so I was wondering has anyone
> set up a system as Ive described and can advise on any gotchas? Does
> anyone know of a souce of documention describing what Im trying to do?
> 
> Another point of note is that in the main these servers seem to offer
> Debian as the distro of choice.  As im focusing on Fedora now is this a
> drawback or an issue?
Well, you'll have to learn some more stuff and some different ways of
doing things.  I use Debian myself, and bytemark offered Debian so
that worked well for me.  Bytemark offer a RedHat9 variant, but no
fedora (that I can see).  On the other hand,  Linode offers Fedora
Core 2 (I'm just looking at their front page), so maybe that would be
a reason to go the Linode route.

Michael