VDS: Configuration

For the most part, the fact that your server is running on shared hardware will be completely transparent to you and you should configure your server as you would any other Linux server. However, there are a few settings that are required in order to make your server interact correctly with our server management software. All required configuration changes have been made already in our default installations. This page explains why they are needed, and gives details of how to recreate these settings should they be lost.

Console

Your server has been configured to run a getty on /dev/tty0. This is not the default for most Linux distributions, but it is necessary in order to access your server's console using the Admin Shell. To enable this, you should have a line in your /etc/inittab similar to:

0:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty0

There will also be an entry for /dev/tty0 in /etc/securetty.

Reboot vs Halt

Our Virtual Dedicated Servers are powered by User Mode Linux (UML) which works by running a Linux kernel as a user-space program on the host computer. When you "halt" a VDS, this process ends, and our server management software restarts your server. If you "reboot" the server (using the reboot command, or shutdown -r) the machine is restarted within the same process.

For this reason, you should always halt your server, rather than reboot it, and let our server management software take care of restarting it. This allows any configuration changes, such as server changes or memory upgrades, to take effect.

The Ctrl-Alt-Delete handler for your server is configured to halt the machine, rather than reboot it. If you edit /etc/inittab you will see a line similar to:

ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -h now

It is important that you do not change this line, as it allows us to cleanly shutdown your server on the rare occasions that we need to reboot the host server.

Our admin key

We install an SSH key in root's authorized_keys2 file on your server. In the event that we have to reboot the host server, this will allow us to initiate a full shutdown on your server, giving any logged-in users advance warning of the shutdown.

This key is restricted to running the shutdown command only, and does not allow us access to your server for any other purpose. If you remove it, we cannot guarantee that your server will be shutdown cleanly.

Disks

Your server is configured with two disks. Your Linux installation is on /dev/hda, and your swap space is on /dev/hdb1. Please do not attempt to repartition these two disks. It may work in the short-term, but it is likely to break if you upgrade your diskspace.