I became interested in VPS.NET when they sponsored DrupalCon Chicago last March. It was nice to know they were adding a node so geographically close to me, and fun to watch how many exhibits they could get the VPS.NET robot into. I have had mine on my desk(unless the office cats knock it off) as a reminder to check back for deals and remind me if the need arose.
Recently I have been researching the availability of my systems and how to improve that availability. Name servers are quick to setup, redundant, and very low load. The perfect place to start! No worry of going over bandwidth allotments. No need for extra storage. The 600Mhz and 384mb of ram is more than enough. I used to run mail/web/ns on a 233mhz with 384mb of RAM circa 2004. My 2 current name servers were both on the same internet connections at the same site. I would hate customer's on-site exchange servers to stop processing mail if the site went dark. VPS.NET to the rescue. Within 30 minutes I had a node provisioned that had plenty of low latency bandwidth to handle my name server load. Install Centos 5 then:
# yum update # yum install bind-chroot # scp currentslave:/etc/named.conf newslave:/etc/named.conf # service named start.
Once I had the redundancy and individuality of the VPS.NET node I was wondering what else I could do. It wouldn't be detrimental to have to reboot the node. Oh yea IPv6. I have been trying to get IPv6 running for all my services. I've been reading about the government mandates to be dual stack, but I recently read the next step will be removing IPv4 and going IPv6 only(no time line of course).
I started researching 6in4 and 6to4 tunnels with ping and traceroute handy. I found the 6to4 anycast address was 192.88.99.1 and I found the closest 192.88.99.1 was 3ms away, but tunnelbroker.net's Chicago router was only 1.88ms away. I've had customer's ask as they have heard of legislation. I assured them they weren't affected but would love to tell them we already support IPv6. I setup the tunnels and my first IPv6 name server is a VPS.NET node. I tweeted @vpsnet and they were quick to respond with “We should have native support in the next few months” I look forward to native IPv6 on my name server node.
Just a note CentOS 5 doesn't have a statefull ip6table. It won't provide errors it just won't work.