Hello,

I am looking at a RackShack $99/month server and I have a question... Can these RAQ4i's handle DNS good? I will be offering hosting accounts on them and would like to use my own DNS rather than theirs, but can the server handle the load of DNS and email and apache for say maybe 50 to 100 hosting accounts? I plan on just buying another RAQ or even a plain linux box with WHM on it after 50 to 100 accounts are sold.

Also, is there a lot of everyday administration to do with a RAQ4i? I hear the Server Admin interface makes it pretty simple... I do know how to do some things manually (like over a year ago I built my own FreeBSD box and managed to configure Sendmail 8.9 and BIND and Apache with FP on my own, I had a hacker or something try to do some damage once but the administration via command line was not too tough, especially with help from IRC or message boards).

Thanks!

Yeah, sure they can.

I have a server with them and they are handling everything great!

I have sent you a PM in case you decide to sign up with them :)

The raqs are very easy to admin out of the box. However, I find you need to add quite a few things to them to bring them up to speed. For example, default security is not the best -- SSH would be better. MySQL is not installed. The partitioning scheme is really poor for busy sites and the / partition will fill up quickly, especially if you have a lot of perl modules, logging, or other types of materials that go in the / partition. For RS's price, these drawbacks are minor. There are pkg files which you can install from the web interface.

If you have several low volume sites -- then a raq can make your and your clients life a lot easier.


(Sending the PM to get your affliates bonus huh? ;) )

You originally asked about DNS.. I've found that the raqs are great as a dns server, but do NOT use cnames as with the current configuration, you will have problems with sendmail. That was one of my mistakes when first working on the RaQs..

Hope this helps..

By the way.. I'm new here, first post as a matter of fact, hope I wasn't posting on anyone's toes ;)

Rob

Originally posted by huck
The raqs are very easy to admin out of the box. However, I find you need to add quite a few things to them to bring them up to speed. For example, default security is not the best -- SSH would be better. MySQL is not installed. The partitioning scheme is really poor for busy sites and the / partition will fill up quickly, especially if you have a lot of perl modules, logging, or other types of materials that go in the / partition. For RS's price, these drawbacks are minor. There are pkg files which you can install from the web interface.

If you have several low volume sites -- then a raq can make your and your clients life a lot easier.


(Sending the PM to get your affliates bonus huh? ;) )

That's true (both parts) :D

I had to install mysql, webmail, upgrade php, webalizer, autosetup and tons of other stuff too.

But after installation, and after everything runs correctly, it's a breeze. Can finally enjoy the results of all that hard work (well, slowly anyway). Right now, I'm working on a way to improve the control panel on the RaQ.

I don't mean just changing the interface, but to have a completely different interface. It's not easy, but it's a challenge. Can't wait till it's done.

At the moment, I've developed a system that monitors clients and resellers. All through a mysql backend. Designed it to suit the company, coz I didn't trust any of the softwares available out there. Ended up working great :)

Are you hacking the existing cobalt code or re-writting your own CP?

I took a look at the cobalt code and it is kind of funky. Sometimes it pulls stuff out of the database and other times it just parses httpd.conf. To me you would want to do one or the other but not both.

I was interested in adding mod_throttle to the site settings -- but right now, I don't have time to do that. To put it in the CP and just have it parse the httpd.conf file should be fairly simple. But, I need to explore how the CP is cobbled together a bit more first.

I'll be re-writing my own CP but to do that completely, I'll need to play around with the existing cobalt code.

If possible, I want to do away with the cobalt gui (since it's just soooo ugly) and have my own gui :D