[mdlug] Looking for Shell Accounts

[Brandon F]

Wow, more good information from everyone.  I'm going to print out Aaron's
email and give it to my guys and get on it myself.  I can do the basics in
the terminal but sed, awk etc and regular expressions have always been too
much for me.

I've also heard good things about Linode and I'll pass that on to my guys
too.  So far I've setup a Debian 6 Squeeze VPS on Chunkhost for the free
beta and secured SSH access.  Next I'm going to read the man pages for
openVPN and go over Aaron's info.

Thanks again MDLUGGers!

Brandon

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org>wrote:

> 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
>
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