[Openvds-devel] freevsd hijack and 4.5.10 /redhat 7.2 installation

[rick oneil]

ok, i'm the new guy....

hello, we run an isp with the ENSIM solution.  it is a virtual dedicated
server system with a large upfront cost for the ServerXchange ($25k) and a
monthly recurring fee for each virtual server as well as the applications
that are installed.  (no not good!!!) I've studied it and used it in a
production enviroment for over a year and am pleased to say that I want to
dump it and move to the openVDS, freevsd or openVSD related solution.  No
need to pay third parties anymore.

In my research of freevsd, the sponsoring company has contacted me well over
10 times in the past 6 months trying to get me to purchase thier
"notfreevsd"
varient of the open source solution.  So I thought I'd try it out.  BUT
seems
they have not released the 4.5.10 on the ftp site for months.  SO i could
not
"try it out" easily.  Pissed me off that I have to spend hours trying to
find
the 1.4.5.10 on the freesoftware foundation site (url below).

Further, my reading of the list archives have led me to believe that the
sponsoring company has actually chosen not to put the rpm's and source on
the
freevsd ftp site!!~!  Damn,. i know they need to make money but this
violates
the whole concept of open source software.  I am totally thrown back by
thier
actions and will never purchase anything from them.  EVER! If they were
smart, they would stop this hijacking of freevsd and try to sell addon's to
freevsd to us, who may be willing to pay for certian third party tools.
This
way, they are seen as a cooperating entity much like mysql.com is handled.

so anyway heres the question

------------

I've installed on a redhat 7.2 system the freevsd-1.4.10-pre3.src.rpm file
that I downloaded from http://freesoftware.fsf.org/download/openvds/

The reason I used 7.2 was because I wanted to use hardware and NICs that 7.2
recognized without additional drivers.  It worked.  I compiled the source,
but did not install the packaged, even though Simon from the freevsd support
list has updated packages for 7.2, i chose to use a pre-configured skel that
was on the freevsd ftp site.  It is a redhat 6.2 skel. Seems to work,
testing
not completed, though.

The biggest issues were the failure of the vsdadm vs_create function.  Took
me hours to figure out that the SSL had to be setup.  Seems when I compiled,
i did not specifically include the option to compile the SSL into freevsd,
but I was able to create the cert.  then by running the svsdadm vs_create
.....  i was able to create the vserver.   SO was SSL compiled into the
freevsd-1.4.10-pre3 ???  I think so or I don't think I would have been able
to create the certs.  (wierd thing though, now I can't find the vsd-genca
file???? anyone ??? )

OK so that's cool, now I spend hours trying to get the webadmin-1.4.5.tar.gz
to work.  My experiences are as follows:

The documentation for the webadmin refers to an earlier version of tags for
mod_auth_mysql, they won't work, you'll have to modify them in the
httpd.conf
file to be like this :

<Location /vsdadm>
        AuthName "VDS Control Panel"
        AuthType Basic
        AuthGroupFile /dev/null
        AuthMySQLHost localhost
        AuthMySQLDB vsdadmsite
        AuthMySQLUserTable siteusers
        require valid-user
        AuthMySQLNameField id
        AuthMySQLPasswordField passwd
        AuthMySQLCryptedPasswords Off
        require valid-user
        AllowOverRide AuthConfig
</Location>

Ok so don't forget to make sure address@hidden with no password is allowed
into mysql database vsdadmsite.....

Now we can login to the vsdadm website,  things look good.  As long as your
vserver is running, you'll see the green status animated gif.   To the right
you'll see the Administrate buttom.  Click it and you get the
http://vdsadmin.hisite.com/vsdadm/index.phtml?oid=1
page.

So far so good, now click any of the configure button and I get

-----------

Internal Error :

Communications Time Out.
The hosting server this virtual server is on may not be running, or
you have tried to make a connection to an invalid server.

If the hosting server is down, a Support Engineer has been paged.

--------

This, i believe is due to the webadmin's lack of SSL support, am I right?
This must mean that my freevsd source compilation does have SSL support,
hense the webadmin cannot complete the socket connection.

I have traced the php file that does to actual connection to the file
freevsd_commslib.phtml

and the low level function that does the connection

-------------

function vsd_init_comms ($servername, $port) {

/* Open a communications socket with the appropriate host server

*/

        $fp = fsockopen($servername, $port, &$errno, &$errstr, 10);
        if(!$fp)
                return -1 ;
        else
                return $fp ;
 }

----------------
Not being a php programmer, what do we need to do to modify this function to
support SSL? if that is the reason that the connection is not being made.

----------------

the function above is called by

function vsd_go ($hostname, $vs, $sdata, &$rdata, $port = 1725) {

        // start time
        $st = microtime() ;

        // open and execute to vsd
        $fp = vsd_init_comms ($hostname, $port) ; // initate comms with the
chosen host server (or nameserver/dedicatedserver)

        if ($fp == -1) {

                $msg = "
Communications Time Out.
The hosting server this virtual server is on may not be running, or
you have tried to make a connection to an invalid server.

If the hosting server is down, a Support Engineer has been paged.";

                $arr[0]["error"] = $msg; // product an array compatable with
the one returned by
                                        //  vsd_parse_output()

        } else


-------------------

hope the info here helps someone and also I hope to see php experts try to
fix the non-SSL webadmin functions.

thanks

rick oneil