GoFundMe Complete

[wolstech]

You can think of it like the Java support. You'll be able to request IIS-behind-Apache, just like you can get Tomcat-behind-apache now.

 

There will be a few extras on Lily though, like another database server. I'm also looking into whether I can do Ruby on Rails through IIS, which would let us finally upgrade Johnny's ancient software.

[ziad87]

So are you saying Lily is the new flagship server? (judging by all these messages I assume yes?)

Edited April 2, 2018 by ziad0

[wolstech]

No actually. It will be an extension of Tommy that provides more features, not a replacement for Tommy.

 

A "Tommy+Lily account" (if we call it that, depending on how it's implemented) will actually be comprised of two parts, a Tommy account and a Lily account. Users will never really see the Lily account though. They sign into Tommy and use Tommy's cPanel, but Apache will be pointed to IIS as a reverse proxy (like Tomcat is when you enable Java). There will be a different FTP location for files since they need to go on a different server.

 

Many of the options in the Tommy account's cPanel will disappear when you have Lily enabled. For example, you'll lose Multi-PHP, Java, Python, Perl, File Manager, FTP sub accounts, and Softaculous support entirely. At some point we'll likely add options in there for Lily, like tools for managing the additional database server.

[ziad87]

Ah ok. So you will create another cpanel "package" which uses Lily's functions. But you still log in on https://tommy.heliohost.org:2083 but your site would be coming from lily.heliohost.org

Also, if you won't have a file manager, maybe you could implement a net2ftp installation. Then customize it to make it look like the origanal cpanel file manager.

When you said you can request IIS behind Apache, thats basically a server move (your files will get moved, apache-only things removed, you enter that  other package) right?

 

(By the way, in your GoFundMe page it says you will be buying a new physical server. But Lily ends in "y",  implying that it is a VM. So the physical server will run ESXI? Then what will the physical server be called?)

 

I found a word combiner on the internet. There are some ideas for tommy+lily accounts.

One of the options were toy?

Edited April 3, 2018 by ziad0

[wolstech]

Ah ok. So you will create another cpanel "package" which uses Lily's functions. But you still log in on https://tommy.heliohost.org:2083 but your site would be coming from lily.heliohost.org

 

Pretty much. A visitor to a website would never see it. They'll visit yourdomain.heliohost.org like they always have.

 

 

 

(By the way, in your GoFundMe page it says you will be buying a new physical server. But Lily ends in "y",  implying that it is a VM. So the physical server will run ESXI? Then what will the physical server be called?)

 

We actually already own the server. What we had to buy was a NAS to make the server useful.

 

The actual server is a unit named Katie. The owner donated it late last year because he needed half of it for personal projects. The other half is what will become Lily. The problem is that it has like 30GB of space, which isn't even enough to install Windows (Server 2016 wants 25GB, and the ISO is 8GB...). The GoFundMe was held so we could purchase a NAS to get the additional space we need to actually use it. Some of the space from the NAS will also be used for Tommy so we can offer free accounts again.

 

Right now, the Lily half just runs a tiny CentOS VM with the linux version of HelioMine 24/7 since its useless for anything else until we install the storage. The storage hardware has been ordered and shipped to the data center, hopefully it'll get installed in the next few weeks so I can actually start building this.

[ziad87]

Then what would the NAS be called? If the NAS goes down, All lily and some tommy accounts will be down, but not all? And you could manage a website that is down through tommy's cpanel (Mail/dns but not things that are hosted on windows.)

Edited April 3, 2018 by ziad0

[wolstech]

The NAS itself probably won't get a name since it's not a server in the conventional sense, it's a storage appliance. The network switch in the rack lacks a name too...

 

If the NAS were to fail entirely, we'd lose access to the accounts on Tommy's extended disk (the NAS disk usually appear as a partition like any other, odds are these accounts will get stored in /home1 or something similar). For Lily, fi it ends up being built how I imagine, Lily won't boot if the NAS is down. Tommy's cPanel would still let them log in, but their site would be down (likely giving a 503 Service Unavailable or some similar error because Apache would respond, but can't connect to IIS to pass the requests through) and their files and any DBs stored on  would be inaccessible. Mail/DNS/etc. would still work, and provided their account is on the non-NAS half of Tommy, it could be converted to a Tommy account at the expense of their data.

[ziad87]

And Windows would throw a bazillion errors if it cuts while in operation as its boot drive is down.

Like ejecting the C:/ drive through cmd

[wolstech]

Won't even throw errors in many cases...it just freezes or blue screens. Linux has a much higher tolerance for having its boot volume yanked out of under it.

 

Some OSes (like ESXi) can actually run perfectly fine without their boot disk present, so long as it doesn't expect to do something like use the disk for swap (when one of our disks died a while back, it was a boot drive...the server kept running for quite some time, and only packed up when it finally tried to swap something due to load and couldn't find the swap file...)

[ziad87]

Sometimes ESXI would outright crash yet the VMs still run.

(yeah, hypervisor technology)

 

ESXI is pretty error proof. (or at least its running VMs) 

[wolstech]

I have a home server with ESX that started doing that recently. I suspect a SATA controller issue since it keeps producing warnings about all 4 disks being in an unknown state every half hour in its logs. The fact it's all 4 disks, and the fact the disks themselves are perfectly fine based on testing makes me think that box needs a new MoBo in the near future...

 

When it hangs, the thing goes dead to the outside world with no network connectivity to ESX or any VMs, not even the local console works to reboot it (lugged a monitor over to it, no video)...but you can tell the VMs keep working. The disks are happily flashing away despite no way to interact, and once you reboot, it's obvious that it was business as usual for the VMs when you look at their logs and see things logged during the time ESX was frozen.

[ziad87]

That happened once for me. I  had a server running WS2012 and it was an ADDC.

Then ESXI crashed, and I tried to connect to it, to no avail.

But wait! The computer I logged on to was on that server's domain. And it was the only domain controller.

So I tried to connect  to that server with VNC, and to my surprise, it worked! I could open programs, log in, browse the internet.

But no video came out of the physical server. So I shutdown Windows (and my other VMs) and hard reset the server.

[wolstech]

I'll just leave these here...

 

http://lily.heliohost.org/~wolstech/test.aspx

 

http://lily.heliohost.org/~wolstech/info.php

[ziad87]

Congrast! Lily works now!

When do you think free sign ups on Lily will open? 

Edited April 23, 2018 by ziad0

[wolstech]

It's got a long ways to go. IIS and mariadb work, but there's nothing else done yet. None of the tommy integration, ftp, mail, dns, heliohost admin tools interfaces, or automation to manage it all has been built yet.