Slicehost: Boot your slices with your own custom kernel | Hacker News Reader

Slicehost: Boot your slices with your own custom kernel

slicehost.com

19 pointsnotmyname14 comments

Unfortunately, Slicehost is growing more and more irrelevant. I'll just have to bite the bullet and migrate the rest of my servers to linode...

I do agree. I migrated my personal server after the RAM increase at Linode and all of my company's servers as well.

I can't think of any other new features SliceHost has rolled out in the last 6 months.

Hmm, how did you migrate? I have so many sites and old cruft that anything short of a clone of the VM will fail horribly...

Short answer: Build scripts + standard layout.

(I'm a Debian guy) I used 'dpkg -l' to check what all I had currently installed and narrowed down what packages I was still using. Check /etc/init.d for start up scripts. Hard files on disk are easy to migrate, live migrating MySQL data is more tricky, but my personal sites don't really have that much going on. I always keep a .tar.gz of the entire server for future reference.

Move over as much as possible and try to get things running. Save your .bash_history and get a build script going. Pull any /etc/ config files you are missing. Reinstall your required packages. Test your new site via editing /etc/hosts, then move the DNS. Watch your logs and look for 404 erors for files you didn't copy over correctly.

It takes time, but if you use an organized and repeatable process, it can take less time in the future.

Same here. I also hacked up (with Linode) a Linode Stack Script (for those that do not know, it's basically a fancy bash script that gets run upon deployment.)

It goes through the trouble of installing all of my various dpkg dependencies, setting up mysql, downloading and compiling rails and nginx w/ passenger, as well as setting up my bash prompt.

This is a good starting point: http://bit.ly/WdezH

Thanks, I read that but it sounds like a hassle, I guess I'll have to bite the bullet. Thanks!

wow you have been able to do this on linode for years :/

But with slicehost you get to pay twice as much. I honestly thought slicehost had been killed off when they were bought by rackspace.

It's amazing how much you can coast on momentum.

I was originally going to say that, being a linode customer for many years. But, I think it is great that other popular VPS solutions are stepping up. Very nice addition slicehost.

I am very surprised that Slicehost is still being updated. I thought that after the acquisition RackSpace was purposefully not updating Slicehost to get more customers to use their RackSpace branded version

This update make me wonder if Rackspace is seeing that there was more to slicehost then just the platform, and maybe considering focusing on the slicehost brand.

I still love the Slicehost docs and use them even though I'm on linode. If it looked liek Slicehost wasn't being ignored I would gladly move back.

Maybe I'm nuts but Slicehost for me still has the best stability of the various VM providers I use.

well, lack of that is why I left slicehost, but even EC2 allows custom kernels now. So a bit late, but glad people are seeing this as the important feature it is -- for quick security response if nothing else.

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