OVH web hosting - two weeks review
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Our tale of woe and drama commenced on the morning of Thursday the 5th February when we placed our order for a Superplan 08 + dedicated server. We were so naive, we thought the hardware spec, the bundled support services (vKVM, free technician time etc) and the much hyped ‘IP Failover’ mechanism were terrific - along with a quick setup time (1 hour) and IP geolocalisation. “Give us one of those!” we exalted. Sure enough, OVH processed our payment lickety quick and within a matter of hours we received our root login details from OVH support. It started out so well, little did we know that hell in all its firey glory awaited with baited breath.
Our plans for this particular server involved having several virtual machines (VMware) running on the server, performing different tasks, one was to be a webserver, the other a mailserver while the host machine was to be a DNS nameserver. We immediately set about installing VMware Server, however we came across a rather ugly error. VMware refused to compile because the version of gcc used to compile the running kernel was version 3.* while the version installed on the server was v4.4.*. We’d never come across this, in all our RHCE’ing days, VMware actually managed to compile pretty much ok on all servers / hardware we’d ever used. So we checked the kernel and found we were running a ‘made-in-OVH’ kernel, basically a custom built kernel compiled by OVH themselves, this must be the much-famed ‘NetBoot’ system. We were under the impression that the ‘Net-Boot’ system was a rescue system which allowed the server to be booted into a functional kernel (albeit an OVH kernel) without the need to go directly into a rescue kernel.
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