DreamhostPStools » Uncategorized

API for PSMySQL servers

Antonio — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:39:05 +0000

Dreamhost did a cool job launching an API to control many of the aspects of their offered services, and mostly PS servers, with great features like resizing the resources of CPU & memory, but this feature it's only related to the standard PS servers, not the PSMySQL ones.

There is a running suggestion requesting to extend the API to the PSMySQL servers here. Do not forget to vote for it

Thanks to Freeman for bringing me this to my attention.

Dreamhost API Contest

Antonio — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:12:59 +0000

Yeah, I know it's a hell of time since the contest finished and such, and this post it's quite rusty and late for that, but after "returning" to this blog from some sturdy laziness, I guess it's fair to write a few words about it.

Why that? Because due that contest many people submited really great tools and aplications and those shouldn't be forgotten, and also because Dreamhost was so generous giving $100 to everyone who had submitted an application to the contest and didn't won.

You can find the winners here: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/06/22/big-boy-time-is-up/

And the whole list of tools here: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/API_Apps

DreamhostPStools’s Forums

Antonio — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:39:13 +0000

Any website usually has its own forums, so here they are:

http://dreamhostpstools.com/forums

So post there whatever you want to share with us, your suggestions, ideas, questions, or even your problems related with Dreamhost's Private Servers. Maybe we could find a solution for you.

Indeed a short post.

Saving cash at your Dreamhost PS

Antonio — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:30:06 +0000

I coded another tool, vpsadjust, this one is saving myself some bucks already and providing a dynamic amount of CPU and memory resources.

This script basically does monitoring on the free resources at your PS, if there are some amounts of “wasted” resources, i.e. 300Mb of free memory, it logs at Dreamhost’s control panel and reduces the CPU/Memory to a lower level. And in the other side, if your PS is already swapping memory, the script logs at the control panel and raises your resources to reduce the swapping.

So, at the end, I only pay for the resources I need and when I’m not using them, they are returned to Dreamhost reducing my monthly bill.

It’s not only a saving matter, it’s also a best service provided to my customers, as my websites won’t show any longer (or not so often) that ugly and disgusting “HTTP 500 Internal Server Error” produced by shortage of PS resources.

Check My PS Status at this site to see my own usage trend

First post

Antonio — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:16:20 +0000

It’s not the first time I find that my PS it’s not working properly due it’s has lost NFS mounts, or it went out of memory due a sudden peek of traffic or maybe because a few zombie processes are hanging around produced by my not-so-good programming skill
Usually the quick and dirty workaround it’s to reboot the PS, but you only can do it manually at Dreamhost’s control panel.

As there is no way I could be checking my PS status all the time, and I’m not going to double the amount I’m paying already to avoid any chance of high rare peeks of traffic, I submitted a ticket to Dreamhost support asking by any way to automate reboots:

Hi,

Is there any chance I could automate reboots on my Dreamhost PS?

For example, if the number of zombie process is above 5 -> reboot PS

The hard way it's coding the Perl LWP script that logs in this panel and does the same thing at your form, but that's too crappy and I'd prefer to not take that path

Best regards.

Antonio.

And the answer:

Hello Antonio,

> Is there any chance I could automate reboots on my Dreamhost PS?

Sorry! We currently do not have an option to easily reboot your Dreamhost
PS via the console. You will need to (unfortunately) write the script the
access the panel in order to setup this automated reboot process.

If we add anything in the near future I will be glad to let you know, but
right now there is no easy method to automate these reboots.

Thanks!

So, this is how is born the first tool at DreamhostPStools.com: vpsreboot.pl

perl vpsreboot.pl
13:23:04: Logging at panel...
13:23:09: Logged in succesfully!
13:23:09: Requesting reboot of xxxxxx PS ...
13:23:11: Reboot pending!

And voila! PS rebooted and serving pages again

Once the script is executed it schedules the PS reboot, there is not any kind of intelligence to evaluate if the reboot was really needed or not (yet!).

Some improvements which came to my mind are:

Send an email to the owner each time a reboot is scheduled.
Add a security delay to avoid queued reboots produced by any kind of mistake or wrong behaviour.
Sites monitoring based on Dreamhost PS, after several errors launch an automated scheduled reboot.

And possibly more in the future.