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TinyKVM - part 2 - (almost) a month later
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TinyKVM - part 2 - (almost) a month later

lwtlwt Member
edited February 2018 in Reviews

Follow-up from part 1.

  • 0 downtime so far.
  • 7GB promised = 7GiB (NB. GiB not GB)
  • provider added support for netboot.xyz a few minutes after request.
  • very nice to have console access via noVNC
  • not so nice that OS reinstall really means it: the VM is destroyed and recreated. This means that I cannot use a recovery ISO of any kind on my own. Bummer. Would be nice to have an option to boot one of the recovery CDs without VM destruction. NB. There may be a way to do it that I could not see. If yes, looking forward to learning about it (and updating this review).
  • to overcome point above I installed a second Debian copy exclusively for recovery. The bad news is that ate 2 GiB.
  • I already wrote this in part 1 but it bears repeating because it is important to me: supplied IPv4 is clean.
  • the VM comes with empty disk (not even partitioned), you boot into OS install disk. Much nicer than having a minimal install that you have no control on and that prevents you from partitioning the disk as you like. Saves time because you do not have to either trust supplier to provide a clean install (I do not as a general policy) or to manually check/validate it.

Part 3 will come after a few more months :-)

FYI, I run exim4, fail2ban, lighttpd and mariadb on a zfs root on this 256MB machine and backup it offsite daily using znapzend (and already recovered it once after a screw-up - just recreated the pool, dumped the backed-up filesystems on it, installed grub and booted). :-)

Thanked by 2angstrom coreflux

Comments

  • @lwt said: not so nice that OS reinstall really means it: the VM is destroyed and recreated. This means that I cannot use a recovery ISO of any kind on my own. Bummer. Would be nice to have an option to boot one of the recovery CDs without VM destruction. NB. There may be a way to do it that I could not see. If yes, looking forward to learning about it (and updating this review).

    This is also my experience. Not clear whether there's a workaround. Personally, though, I haven't yet been in the situation where I would want to use a recovery CD, but that's a good point.

  • @lwt said: 7GB promised = 7GiB (NB. GiB not GB)

    Good point.

    It's funny: when I did my initial install, I had the impression that I could choose between two disks of 7GiB, which surprised me, but perhaps I'm misremembering something. However, I do seem to remember that two disks were initially available.

    Thanked by 1lwt
  • Cute (meant friendly). But: Uhm, 256 MB ~ tiny?

    I had and have plenty 256 MB VPSs and would also gladly 128 MB ones (KVM or XEN, please) but they aren't easy to get.

    256 MB isn't tiny at all. I had/have dns, mail and even mid size web apps on 256 MB. All together (BSD. Dunno for debian)

  • I had a weird dream last night, that involved my running FreeBSD for some reason. I probably don't want to remember any more details.

  • abjrabjr Member
    edited March 2018

    I recently signed up with TinyKVM as well and there are a few possible recovery methods.

    1) It looks like the installation .iso is left in the "CD/DVD" drive. Open the VNC console and reboot from the command line. When you see the SeaBIOS message, press ESC or F12:


    Press '3' to boot again from the CD/DVD. This is really nice if you installed via the netboot.xyz.iso because of the variety of tools it provides.

    2) You can use memdisk to boot an ISO right from LILO/GRUB. For example I use Slackware which still uses LILO. I have a small partition for /boot and I set up an entry as follows to boot the netboot.xyz.iso right from LILO:

    image = /boot/memdisk
    label = netboot.xyz.iso
    initrd = /boot/netboot.xyz.iso
    append = "iso"
    read-only

    You can get memdisk from your distro's syslinux package.

    I hope this helps someone!

    Thanked by 2angstrom coreflux
  • angstromangstrom Moderator

    @abjr said: I hope this helps someone!

    Thanks, useful if one wants to have the possibility of a (small) rescue ISO.

    Yeah, one has to be careful not to try to update the OS via a newly mounted ISO, because the mounting of the ISO would automatically delete the OS, so any OS updates have to be done over the net.

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