There is currently no way to build a server on one account from an image on another account, at least not directly. This article will show you how to do it manually using a Cloud Files image.
This only covers Linux servers, Windows users get no love! (Actually, once I’ve had a chance to test on Windows servers I’ll update this article as to whether it’s possible and what steps are required to do it.)
Server security is one of those topics that there’s a lot of different opinions flying around. How secure do you want to be? It really comes down to how much you want to inconvenience your users (and yourself). While there are many different ways to secure a server, this article focuses on an implementation of something I think is a nice cross between convenience and security. For a more in depth view on server security, I would recommend looking at Racker Hacker’s Blog.
However this post is for configuring ppp-pam.
The Rackspace Cloud allows you to save your images to Cloud Files, however currently your automated backups are still stored with server.
Additionally you can only have a backup every day. What if you wanted one say, every 6 hours? You can achieve this with the API, curl and a bash script.
Below is the script, all you need to do is plug in your API key and your username. After that we just need to create a cron job to run it and we’re all good to go.
This Script Requires the Following:
These should all be installed by default, try running the script manually and making sure it doesn’t return any errors before setting up your cron job.
The Ubuntu nfs-kernel-server package installs an init script in /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server that checks the kernel for a certain ksym to determine if the kernel has NFS support compiled in. Rackspace Cloud Servers use a custom kernel that does not include that particular ksym, however NFS functionality is fully supported.
This is an article about setting up a load balancer, so if you’re here it’s probably because you want to set one up. So I’ll keep this section relatively brief. A load balancer is a piece of hardware that accepts incoming traffic and then passes it through to other servers on the backend, this allows you to scale your infrastructure easily with little downtime simply by adding more servers into it. The main benefit of load balancing is distributing the load across multiple servers to make the site run quickly, even when there are a large volume of concurrent connections. This article will be about setting up a software based solution using HA Proxy, this allows you to use a server as a load balancer useful if your in a virtual environment such as the Rackspace Cloud where you can’t have hardware load balancers.
This article assumes you have already set up your apache nodes, and are familiar with using SSH and Linux.
This article will show you some mod_rewrite wizardry to get your static content served from your own “cdn” domain until CNAME support is here.
Requirements
This article assumes you know how to get the public URL for your container, and are familiar with uploading files to the Rackspace Cloud platform.
All implementations require an Apache web hosting account with mod_rewrite enabled.
