You may use it at your crontab to reduce your memory and CPU settings when you have low traffic, and rise it when you usually expect higher one. Also you may use vpsset as a pre-script and post-script tool for some resource intensive scripts, like backups or whatever you need.

Usage it's pretty simple, just type at your command line: <vpsset value>, where value it's the new size of your PS. Previously you need to setup an API key at DreamHost's Web Panel API, and update vpsset.cfg file with your custom data.

Feedback it's welcomed

Download:

• vpsset (x86_64!)
• vpsset32 (x86) 32bits version.

Update 18/04/2009:

Current vpsset version it's for the new Dreamhost PS, the 64bits based. Old PS server run 32bits versions and vpsset won't. My apologies for those who tried in an old PS server and had problems.

I'm trying to find another machine to compile a 32bit version. Added 32bit download vpsset version.

How to know your PS type?

Just type: <uname -a> at your shell. You may get these results:

• Ending with x86_64 GNU/Linux: 64bit version, the new PS servers.
• Ending with i686 GNU/Linux: 32bit version, the previous PS servers.

Right now, I'm testing it's new behaviour but as you may see in the following graph, it's working as it should be:

Isn't awesome?

I hope to bring you fresh news pretty soon.

I have tested his solution and I can say I’m quite happy with it, indeed I was also sharing a FastCGI + APC accelerator for two other domains and at the end I have migrated all of them (five) to the LiteSpeed solution.

You can read the articles at the following links:

Litespeed on Dreamhost PS: Final Optimizations for Stability and Lowest Cost
Compiling PHP5 and eAccelerator for Litespeed on Dreamhost PS

I have only one problem using LiteSpeed Standard proxied behind Apache, and it’s related to some web applications (like WordPress 3.3.4) use the header $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] to get the visitors IP instead of $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'], so the recorded IP it’s your own VPS IP, as it’s the one who sent you the request. Remember, Apache’s mod_proxy has been previously configured to send you the traffic to a running port of your LiteSpeed server.

LiteSpeed Enterprise offers a feature to mask automatically that problem but for other web applications not so “good coded” you’ll have to patch them if you are able (some could be encoded).

In the case of WordPress, there is a ticket submitted at their tracking website to ask for this feature on future releases, but it has been a few months since the last update and no planned date for that.

In the same ticket, some developer called hovenko added the patch file to add that functionality. I tested it and right now I’m running with the modified version in the two blogs which run with LiteSpeed and it’s getting now the correct visitor IP.

Thanks Hovenko!

• vpsguardian. This tool will replace in some way the job done by vpsadjust, as right now it's not possible to have automatic resources configuration, this tool will provide information and trigger actions to help you maintain stable your CPU and memory settings. The different behaviours will be configurable. Main features:
  • When memory is running out will disable crawlers access in all the domains by replacing or updating robots.txt to all denied. As soon the resources are spare again previous robots.txt file will be restored.
  • When memory is running out and CPU is too high, some of the previously configured domains will be set to a redirected custom webpage. This action it's to lower load average and memory usage to let high priority domains have spare resources (i.e. e-commerce websites). The custom webpage could have a standard message saying something like "We are having a heavy usage spike. Please come back later". As soon the resources are spare again, redirection would be disabled.
  • Owner's PS will get warning emails of any special action applied.
  • Optionally vpsguardian will supervise users processes usage. Thresholds could be configured.
  • Optionally vpsguardian will disable custom user services when load and/or memory is too high and enable them after resources are spare.
  • Optionally vpsguardian will kill or renice user's owned processes (from a previously configured list) when load and/or memory is too high.
  • Preconfiguration based on automatic settings taken from panel.dreamhost.com.
  • Store CPU/Memory trends to offer settings recommendations based on historical data.

• vpsbackup. This one it's trivial, it's goal it's to backup all the domains configured in a PS. Optionally include in the backup set MySQL databases. Main features:
  • Preconfiguration based on automatic settings taken from panel.dreamhost.com.
  • Owner's PS optionally will receive reports of all the jobs by email.
  • Historical reports of backup jobs executions (web reports).
  • Possibility to launch pre-backup actions and post-backup actions. I.e. trigger cleaning scripts.
  • Historical backups, to keep several backups at the same time from different days.
  • Optionally upload backup to remote server (using FTP).
  • Optionally encrypt backups.

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...

vpsinfo is a Linux server monitoring script, written in PHP, that provides web access to system status information. It gathers the output from several common Linux commands into one web page, providing a quick overview of the system's current state.

This script coded by Doubles T. Robbins was coded for VPS (Virtual Private Servers) based on Virtuozzo and OpenVZ systems, and for that reason does not work properly on VServer systems, used by Dreamhost PS.I have made a few patches on the original script (version 2.3.2) to enable all those features that were not working on our PS and I'm sharing this patched version.Clicking in the following picture you may see an example of the look and feel of vpsinfo under a Dreamhost PS:

To enable mysql reports, you need to configure these variables at the vpsinfo.php file:

// MyTop/mysqlreport needs MySQL access to read the processlist.

// You may use any MySQL database.

// If you don't use MyTop or mysqlreport just ignore this.

$my_db	 = "";

$my_user = "";

$my_pass = "";

$my_host = "";

And also copy in the same location (as the vpsinfo.php) the mysqlreport tool. You can download both here: [Download id not defined] [Download id not defined]It should run smooth on any PS, but if you find any problem don't hesitate to post a comment or a message in the forum.

Update: I seriously recommend uploading vpsinfo.php to a private location secured by a .htaccess. VPSInfo provides internal system information about your PS, and also meanwhile the page is loaded will consume some of your resources as it needs to execute several tools to generate the reports.