Submitted or created by: Francis at Shell Review …
First of all thanks goes to Richard at Neonsky for making this review possible. Neonsky have been around for a few months now, and currently have one shell box online. This is a P2-400 Celeron with 256MB RAM and a 13GB UDMA33 EIDE drive. The machine is hooked up via a 10mbit port to their uplink, Foonet who currently have a dual T1, which is shared.
Pricing wise, Neonsky offer three main shell packages, starting at $7 a month. For this you get 2 backgrounds, a neonsky.net/~user website, and no disk quota. For $12 a month you get 3 backgrounds, and the same features as the other account. $25 a month buys you the IRCD account which comes with 3 backgrounds one of which can be an IRCD, along with your own dedicated IP. Payment can be made via cheques, money order, Western Union and PayPal. Prices aren’t bad, especially since there are no quotas.
The box runs FreeBSD-4.1-STABLE, which is a fairly recent release. The box was accessible via telnet and SSH1/2. The motd outlined some of the useful commands, including the command to list virtual hosts, drop precompiled eggdrops and bouncers to your directory, and show billing information. Supoprt is available via IRC and there is an FAQ page at support.neonsky.net. The news section pointed out that Neonsky now have some I-lines on client servers.
Taking a look around the box, most of the usual utilities were installed including BitchX, screen, epic, irc, wget, and what not. The telnet and ssh binaries were unfortunately removed for security reasons. Security on the box seemed to be fairly tight compared to the last time I was on the box, which is obviously good 🙂
The machine had 254 processes running in total with 110+ eggdrops so not that loaded, and the uptime certainly shows it can cope. Having said that the machine wasn’t running crond, although crontabs can be setup. The way they probably do it is run crond for say the first day after the machine reboots, that way everyone’s eggdrops are restarted. They then kill crond which helps keep the loads down.
I went on to compile eggdrop1.6.3, doing so in 2 minutes and 44 seconds, which isn’t too bad. Eggdrop1.1.5 compiled in 1 minute and 15 seconds, although for some reason I had to set the TCLLIB and TCLINC variables (to tcl8.0) before it would work.
Going on to run my speed tests, I got the following results:
uptime: 2:25PM up 119 days, 6:58, 5 users, load averages: 1.44, 1.92, 1.98
bitchx: 20 eggdrop: 107 [running]
ftp speed tests for shell.neonsky.net
> SUNSITE.UNC.EDU
14:30:21 (12.03 KB/s) – `ls-lR.html.gz’ saved [3158080]
14:39:42 (12.84 KB/s) – `linux-2.0.36.tar.gz’ saved [7269221]
> FTP.UU.NET 14:41:13 (95.09 KB/s) – `uumap.tar.Z’ saved [8520221]
> FTP.AOL.COM
14:41:34 (104.21 KB/s) – `setup32.exe’ saved [2041253]
> FTP.GNU.ORG
14:41:53 (32.36 KB/s) – `wget-1.5.3.tar.gz’ saved [446966]
As you can see a smashing uptime! Speed tests were fair, will rerun soon to check for consistency. Loads are fairly high, and seem to hover around the 1.0 mark most of the time, but remember this is FreeBSD.
Virtual hosts were fairly abundant with about 60 public hosts containing various domains including .de .to .no and .dk country domains. Getting my bot online wasn’t a trouble at all, and in the day I’ve been watching it, it’s proven pretty reliable, although nothing really to go on. I’ll keep you updated as to how it fares, and any updates! Stay tuned.