[mdlug] Looking for Shell Accounts

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2011-07-08 at 08:57 -0400, Brandon F wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> First of all I want to say hello to everyone again, I'm a longtime reader
> but first time poster.
> 
> I manage a small BPO team and a couple of my members want to expand their
> skills beyond Level 1.  I've been recommending Linux to them based on my
> appreciation for the toolset and the opportunity it can give them to get out
> of helpdesk hell.  So far we've all been studying for the first two Linux
> Professionals Institute certification tests but while I have a few working
> systems, my people are pretty green.
> 
> Can anyone recommend a good place to buy shell access so they can get their
> hands dirty and dig into a system with little consequence?  I'm thinking
> bare bones Ubuntu (that's what they're learning at ITT) with just a BASH
> shell and they can get Apache, PHP, etc installed from there.  Also I'm
> looking for a place where they can take snapshots and easily restore if they
> seriously break anything.

Locally Virtualbox or VMWare workstation works very well on either LINUX
or Windows.  Personally I recommend Workstation, it is worth $$$;  it is
no-fuss, just-works, and performance is excellent.

Otherwise consider a VPS provider.  I use LINODE
<http://www.linode.com/> and am a *very* happy customer.  This gives you
console access and you can install basically any image you like,

> The only other thing is price.  Something with >5GB of space and no more
> than $15 a month would be ideal.

LINODE is $20 a month but provides more storage than that.  Their tech
support is *AWESOME*.  I've had responses in real-time - really
impressive,  and they always seem technically aware.  No Level-1 to
fight through to talk to tech-support that doesn't live in trees.

On the other hand a virtual machine isn't exactly like working on a real
box.  Weird boot issues, garbled boot managers, and bizarre hardware is
part of real life.  Having to install on some creaky old machine is a
good experience;  then use "dd" to wipe out the MBR and get it working
again.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> LPIC-1, Novell CLA
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba