Linux Vservers, and stuff

I’ve had the "pleasure" of reconfiguring Linux Vservers (virtual servers, kernel level, etc), to add additional IP addresses to each. Although this setup is old, and I wouldn’t dare change it to anything else (not on a production server, running 3 vservers, each running 400 hosted sites, etc), so I’ve checked the scripts, and so found out few bugs. For example, someone thought that running X=`expr $X + 1` would do the trick. Much easier (and working) is to do let X+=1. Right?

So, I’ve discovered a bug there, which prevented the usage of more than a single virtual NIC for each vserver, and fixed it. I’ve also started fixing the remains of a lousy setup, where everything is explicitly described, aka, you have conf files, which include the directive "ONBOOT=yes", and you have to put in the startup script the names of the files to read. I rearranged it to scan the directory holding the conf files, and based on the ONBOOT directive, to either start the server, or not.

Also, each Vserver was limited to 16 virtual IP addresses. Maybe it’s with old vservers, and maybe it’s a total limitation of the system, unsolvable, but the customer won’t get his 128 IPs per vserver…

I hate lousy script jobs. I hate
over-customization of servers, where you’ve defined one server, and you have to manually start defining each one of the next 30. I wish I could kill the person who’s done that. It sux.