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A typical dedicated Linux server gives you very little control over it. Disks are rarely partitioned to your liking. Your only option, to recover from problems, is to order a full operating system reinstall.
Our TQMbox servers let you have full control. From the comfort of your home or office, you can: custom-partition disks, optionally enabling software RAID with a single click; install or reinstall the operating system; enter the operating system rescue mode; rebuild the partition table and reinstall boot blocks; power-cycle the server; access the server’s serial console; watch the kernel boot messages; and enter the operating system upgrade mode.
TQMbox is a service mark of A2I COMMUNICATIONS.
The idea seems deceptively simple. Rent a dedicated Linux server in a data center. Let the service provider take care of providing the hardware, the Internet connectivity, the uninterrupted power, and the air-conditioning. This frees you up to concentrate on your applications, which could include web-hosting, mail service, DNS, remote network monitoring, or software development.
Lack of control.
When your service provider initially installs the operating system on the server, the disk partitioning layout is not necessarily what you would have preferred. Swap space is based on some standard formula, not on your needs. You might be particular about where home directories ought to be, and whether /tmp should or should not be on its own partition—but your service provider may use some some other inflexible operating system installation scheme.
Some service providers will customize the installation of the operating system. But you must get it right the first time. They won’t redo it just because you changed your mind.
Or, suppose you experiment with new software on your dedicated server, and a program goes out of control and wipes out some critical files. Or in a moment of rashness (which would never happen to you, except that it just did) you accidentally do “rm -rf” on the wrong root directory. You may end up with an unbootable server. If the server had been at your home or office, you would very likely have been able to fix it. But if the server is the usual dedicated server in a remote data center, you will need to order an operating system reinstall. This operating system reinstall will:
What you need is the exact opposite of this. You need a dedicated Linux server on which:
A TQMbox server.
Our TQMbox server lets you use our easy, friendly Server Configuration web page (see live demo) to decide how you want your server configured. Once you save it, it will be used for subsequent operating system installs on your server, until you change it.
Then access the serial console of your server from our Utilties menu, from where you can:
On the Server Configuration web page (see live demo), choose our defaults.
At your server’s serial console select the uninterruptible install of your operating system.
Everything completes on its own.
Total keyboard time: about three minutes.
Actual installation takes 30–60 minutes, but you don’t need to be present at the keyboard.
Simply change the configuration on the Server Configuration web page, reboot the server, and start another uninterruptible install.
Total keyboard time: three more minutes.
From the serial console, instead of selecting the uninterruptible install, select the interactive install.
The choices you made on the Server Configuration are still active. But now, on each screen, for most of the Linuxes we offer, you can take a second look, and make last-minute adjustments.
So you can choose, and then you can choose again.
We give you a few extras, designed to make life easy for you. These are enabled if you choose the uninterruptible or interactive install. (The manual install is intended to give you a raw installation environment very close to the official distribution of the operating system, and does not include these convenience features.)
We provide ongoing system health graphs for your server. This is done at no charge the first time you make the request. See our example system health charts.
If you are experimenting with new kernels, you could end up with a hung or unbootable machine. But there is no need to be concerned. Suppose you make big changes and make your boot blocks invalid, or have other problems such as invalid modules that make the system unbootable. Simply power-cycle the server from our Server Configuration web page (see live demo). When it powers up, choose the rescue mode for your operating system from the menu. In the rescue mode, the operating system runs on your server from a memory filesystem, and is not dependent on your server’s hard disk(s) in any way. In rescue mode, you may use the standard tools to examine the partitions and filesystems on your disk, and make fixes as needed. While in rescue mode you can, if you wish, completely wipe out a selected partition and rebuild it to meet your needs. You can use standard Linux tools (carefully) to resize or move partitions. You can reinitialize the boot block, or reinstall the boot loader. How effectively you can do these things will, of course, depend on your Linux skills. When done, simply reboot the server. If you made your fixes wisely, it will be back to normal operation.
If not, you can always do a fresh reinstall of the operating system. If you choose the manual install option, the installation is fully under your contol, and you can take steps to preserve user data during the reinstallation.
You could, for example, while still in rescue mode, use the usual tools (e.g., “dump” or “tar” piped into “ssh” or “nc”) to copy valuable data from the server across the internet to your home or office machine, then copy it back later after the reinstall. Or you can simply let your data stay on the server on a selected partition. If you know what you are doing, and do it just right, you should be able to re-install the operating system in manual mode, leaving that selected partition untouched.
You would not normally want to trust your service provider with these delicate operations—which is why we give you the ability to do all this yourself, remotely, from the comfort of your home or office.
Every year, Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center (web site: www.cert.org) announces several hundred security-critical software bugs in various operating systems in use on Internet-connected machines. A significant fraction of those will be relevant to your dedicated server. You may end up having to apply one or two new security updates in an average month—month after month, so long as your server remains on the Internet. Many users with managed or unmanaged servers fall behind in applying fixes, and end up with a compromised server and lost data and lost time.
Our TQMbox servers make security updates so easy to apply, you will have no excuse for letting your server go unpatched.
For selected Linux distributions available from our menu, we run an update server on our network that painlessly makes official bug fixes and security updates available to you. After an uninterruptible or interactive operating system install, your machine is already configured to point to our update server. A single command will bring the entire Linux distribution up-to-date now and again at at any time in the future. Or you can put the command into a “cron” entry and get automatic daily updates.
If we don’t run a local update server for your choice of operating system, your server will get its updates from an official distribution sites for the operating system that you have installed. Updating your server still requires only one easy step.
Our manual install, which is intended for Linux experts, does not attempt to configure your machine for updates. You can (and should) apply updates yourself, by using the standard update mechanisms available for the operating system.
RAID means “redundant array of inexpensive disks”. It’s a way of increasing the reliability of your server by storing the same data on more than one disk.
Simply check the “Enable level 1 software RAID” radio button on the Server Configuration screen, click on Save, and then proceed to install the operating system. Your desired partitioning scheme is automatically and painlessly implemented in RAID form on your dual-disk server.
How do you upgrade the operating system on a remote dedicated server?
You don’t.
Or rather, you couldn’t—until now.
Our TQMbox servers let you access the upgrade functionality of the operating system to which you will be upgrading. See our FAQ item, “How can I upgrade the operating system?”.
This is a choice that you did not have before.
Contact us by telephone at +1 408-293-9706 or by email at support@rahul.net.
This document is part of a web site and should not be read in isolation. All information is subject to change without notice. Not everything described here applies equally to every possible combination of hardware and software. All products and services are provided on an “as is” basis; “with all faults” and “as available.” THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THOSE OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. We are not responsible for the content of external web sites.