Bye bye vpsadjust

Published on February 14, 2008 in Tools. 11 Comments

Today, Dreamhost decided to add a captcha system at the server usage web page, so no more automated adjustment of CPU/Memory settings is possible.

v1cgi.png

It's quite obvious that Dreamhost noticed there were some tools around there using smart decisions on server usage, and that wasn't helping their incomes, and adding this human-detection system was the easiest way to stop those tools. In my opinion, there are other solutions, like avoiding changing settings with certain frecuency, or even offering an API to use Vserver calls funcionality.

That captcha it's not that hard to defeat with some programming, as the text always appear in the same location, same number of chars, no rotation,... but it's not a matter of defeating the captcha to run again the scripts, it's a matter of wasting the time to do it, as changing the captcha format or design it's just a matter of a few lines of code and minutes. So Dreamhost in any case would readapt their captcha to avoid any circumvention of it.

Dreamhost must consider his customers are not happy with wasting resources (and serious money) and nor are happy with offering nasty "500 Internal Server Error" to their visitors.

But as always, we'll have to take what Dreamhost allows us and let us do.

The good news it's vpsreboot still works, no captcha (yet).

Time to create other tools...

11 Responses to “Bye bye vpsadjust”

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  • Rafael Fischmann
    February 15, 2008 at 12:07 am

    That sucks Antonio… as I told you, maybe we could talk to them instead of just posting it over here, what do you think? I’ve already seen a few 500 Internal Server Error messages since vpsadjust stopped working… :(

  • Antonio
    February 15, 2008 at 1:34 am

    Rafael, I know the feeling, but I’m hopeless as for sure they are not going to change the captcha.

    And another user of vpsadjust already complained at support and got nothing.

    I even submitted a suggestion to add API support to that page so they could control the number of requests and allow us to automate our PS configuration, but strangely my suggestion is gone. I dont know if it ever really got registered, as that page hardly works in my browsers.

  • Decio
    March 7, 2008 at 12:12 am

    My DH PS panel doesn’t seem to have that captcha. Did they they it off?

  • Antonio
    March 7, 2008 at 1:08 am

    Hey! Mine neither and I just ran vpsadjust again and it works!! :D 

    [myps]$ ./vpsadjust
16:05:48: Logging at panel...
16:05:56: Logged in succesfully!
16:05:56: Adjusting myps PS to aprox. 150 CPU/Memory ...
16:05:56: Current CPU/Memory = 322
16:05:57: Changed succesfully to 150 CPU/Memory. Difference: -172

    Then… what’s going on here? :)

  • Antonio
    March 7, 2008 at 1:08 am

    By the way… thank you very much Decio!

  • Antonio
    March 7, 2008 at 1:29 am

    I love this graph (and the dollars I’m saving!):

  • Antonio
    March 9, 2008 at 12:21 am

    Bah! Captcha is back! :(

  • IB
    July 30, 2008 at 9:54 am

    Hi!

    They add captha to your panel when they detect the trick. If you sign up today and don’t cheat, they wont add the captcha. Yes, sometimes they do think.

  • Antonio
    March 2, 2009 at 11:14 pm

    Yeah, I agree it’s a pretty fair system… although I don’t agree with the concept of “cheating”, I don’t think what vpsadjust did was cheating, just “smart usage” :D

  • IB
    March 2, 2009 at 11:27 pm

    Forget about Dreamhost PS or you’ll get more and more poor each day.
    Rent a dedicated server! You can get one cheaper than the PS. Just search in for unmanaged servers in German as I did, or in the UK. :)

  • Antonio
    March 2, 2009 at 11:40 pm

    Thanks for the tip IB, I will!

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