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.

Just reading the title of this post you get the idea of how interesting must be the tutorial, and I can tell you it works, as this website and other domains on this PS are running now with LiteSpeed, and thanks to the tips of Yui-Life's webmaster.

You may read the whole article at this link: Optimizing Dreamhost PS CPU and Memory Usage by Installing Litespeed Web Server and it's the first chapter, as it's webmaster has told me he's planning to write a second chapter explaining PHP5.2.5 compile instructions and the eAccelerator opcode binary.

Yui-Life's webmaster is a highly experienced optimizing websites and tunning the guts of webservers. The yui-life photo gallery is a resource for nature photography and Japanese idol photos.

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=1] [download=2]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.

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.

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

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.