On Wed, 4 May 2005, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
heh, how far is OpenVPS now? and what about it's 'current' targets/aims/whatever ...
maybe you could give a short overview?
Well... targets/aims is a big question that I've been trying to answer for a long time :-)
The idea is to provide the missing software between just bare Linux VServer/utils and a hosting environment.
To put it in perspective - anyone who uses vserver is very likely to create some sort of a "image". Of course not knowing what the ultimate goal is there is no telling what that image might be becuase there is a big difference between running a jailed sendmail, a honeypot or hosting a VPS.
But once you define the context, which in this case it _is_ a VPS, then a lot more becomes known - e.g. a VPS should probably include hosting-relevant packages (e.g. apache), you can make a pretty good guess at what services should be enabled, you can do little things like generate an SSL cert, create a default user, fix up mail config, etc, etc.
From the host perspective - VPS's need to be provisioned/stopped/deletedfairly simply, they need to be backed up, you need to monitor resource usage and make sure that things are up, there needs to be a mechanism for keeping up to date with security updates, etc. It is also a given that you would use quite a few of physical servers, and those would need to be easily provisioned, monitored from a central place, etc.
That's in a nutshell what OpenVPS aims to do. It's actually a lot of stuff, and it's not really easily "categorizable" as a "control panel" or whatever (in fact, the CP functionality is quite limited at this point). There is a status page that lists things that it already does reasonably well:
http://www.openvps.org/Plone/about/status
The other aspect of this project that should be mentioned is how it is run - rather than trying to make guesses as to what a hosting company would need, we actually went ahead and started a hosting company (ok, it was actually the other way around - first the company, then the project :)).
As far as I can tell, OpenHosting is the _only_ hosting company that actually makes all (except for the billing stuff) of its software open source and is proud of it, but this is kind of getting OT for this list.
OpenVPS is currently ASL licensed (this might change to GPL) and is all Python/C - that's just my mod_python heritage.
Anyway - if this resonates with anyone on this list - and I _know_ that there are lots of ISP/hosting people here, subscribe to the OpenVPS dev list (http://openvps.org/mailman/listinfo/dev), we could certainly use a lot of help :-)
Grisha _______________________________________________ Vserver mailing list [email protected] http://list.linux-vserver.org/mailman/listinfo/vserver
