uncompiled.com

After deciding to bring back uncompiled.com my first decision to make was “where do I host it?” In 2002, the decision for a random web site I was learning how to do web programming with was simple: put it on my home server. Seven years later, I’d like to believe my purpose is stronger and so is my budget. That said, my budget was still less than $20/mo as I highly doubt this will net me any revenue.

Being that I fancy myself a system administrator, the idea of using a generic web hosting account was kind of sickening. My only real choice at this point for the price I was looking for was to get a VPS (Virtual Private Server) account somewhere. I immediately thought “Cool! But wait, I’ve never bought one — who do I even go through?

So began a search involving copious Googling, firing off Tweets and Facebook posts hoping for advice, and generally, a feeling like I was wading through the endless supply of hosting companies. I decided to put together a basic list of what I wanted from a VPS company and see what I could find.

My VPS Company Wants

1. Based in the USA
2. $20/mo or less
3. In business a few years
4. Positive reviews online
5. Competitive features
6. Simple process
7. A decent web site (yes, really)

While I did receive a slim amount of recommendations, I found that the pricing for the average “big name” VPS company was a bit much for what they offered. Once I cut-away the forest of VPS brand names, I started to compare & contrast about 10 smaller companies, each with their individual perks and price points. One decision that I had not yet made was “What OS do I really want to run?“. This question was mostly settled for me when I found that FreeBSD VPS companies were fairly expensive for the features they were offering. I decided on just going with Debian as it was a fitting choice for a low RAM box (as VPS allocations generally are).

This is where things really got gritty: deciding which of 5 VPS providers, seemingly with very similar services and pricing are set apart from each other. As I started to narrow, fivebean.com started to stand on its own.

A Michigan-based company near Grand Rapids, I was immediately pulled-in for a geographic pride to support a company local to my home state. That being said, pride does not out-weight quality and pricing. Starting to do some quick research (read: googling) I noted quite a number of positive reviews for them. Snippets about great customer service, quality VPS deployments, and fair pricing had me ready to buy almost immediately.

Being the pragmatic technology purchaser I am, I dove further through their own site, admiring the clean design, no non-sense pricing, and direct access to relevant FAQ material and contact information. A technology company who understands how to be marketable for these reasons are going to have a better sense of how to provide top-tier customer service as well. Sometimes it is the small things that really matter.

I ended up finding a suitable VPS package for my current hosting needs, filling-out their simple checkout (PayPal or Google Checkout, nice!), and within seconds, received a litany of e-mails covering everything from my purchase invoice to my server’s IP & credentials. I was floored. Everything was completely automated and worked without a hitch. I was on my VPS in minutes after signing-up and had nothing to complain about!

The administrative interfaces for your account and VPS are simple and easy-to-use. I immediately changed my nameservers and started to host my DNS with their servers and also was able to immediately configure reverse DNS on my IP address. My VPS statistics were clearly laid-out for me, and all of the relevant information I needed was at a finger’s touch.

Magically, I did find a reason to contact customer service a few minutes later. I had read about a promotion regarding some free VPS upgrades by doing an affiliate mention. I shot-off a quick ticket to their customer service and had a reply within an hour. If an hour sounds long to you, I should mention I set my priority to low on the ticket for them, as it was nothing critical. Most companies barely can seem to do 24-hour replies. The reply that I did receive was friendly, personable, and took care of my ‘problem’ before I could finish reading the response.

It’s been a few days now and I am still completely happy with my experience with fivebean.com. For what it’s worth, there was no deal for me to write this about this, nor any compensation sought. I just really appreciated the experience I had from browsing, to sign-up, to deployment, to customer service. I highly recommend them for VPS needs of all sizes.

Today while updating the server that uncompiled.com runs on, I ran into a weird problem that is a first for me using Debian. After changing my APT sources from Lenny to Sid and doing a routine apt-get dist-upgrade, I by necessity went to change my root password. Normally a very mundane task for a Linux system, I immediately hit a wall.

www:~# passwd root
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

Upon seeing this, I started to figure out reasons why this may occur. After attempting to double-check /etc/passwd & /etc/shadow for any anomolies, I moved on to a recommendation by a friend who told me to try a pwconv just in case files had gotten out of sync. Nothing was panning out for a solution. I decided to test a normal user account which presented me with an interesting situation.

www:~# passwd test
Current Kerberos password:

Here’s the problem — I don’t use Kerberos on this system, nor did I even have the software installed to begin with on the system. Having noted this, I edited /etc/pam.d/common-password and noticed immediately that an undesired line was present

password        requisite                       pam_krb5.so minimum_uid=1000

I went ahead and decided to just completely purge the problem considering that again, I had no use for Kerberos authentication with PAM on my system. I opted to execute the following command.

# apt-get remove –purge libpam-krb5

Once executed, password changing resumed to functioning properly.