Recently I got around to installing a new Strato VServer of the medium powerful sort. Instead of bothering with Ubuntu, I wanted Gentoo. Strato (like many other virtual hosters) uses Virtuozzo/OpenVZ and after a few glitches the installation was relatively painless. Strato provides a recovery system which mounts the disk of the virtual server in some directory so that you can just go there and replace all the files with a Gentoo stage3. Network configuration can be a bit tricky, but since you can always go back to recovery system and check logs it is not undoable either. The most irritating glitch was that before you can start, you have to replace the preinstalled Ubuntu by CentOS as this seems to be the only way to reconfigure the Virtuozzo container to actually call /sbin/init. Another small problem is that booting will fail because udev is trying to mount /dev which is already mounted so it needs to be removed from the boot process. Anyway, there were no serious barriers and the server was up and running in less than 2 hours.
There are by now a few outdated guides around on the Internet, so I decided to update the only one I could get access to: Virtuozzo Guest install (in German). To my knowledge this is a correct up-to-date guide now. Unfortunately it is only available in German for now, but isn’t that a great chance to get to know a new language?
An interesting observation is that Strato is apparently running enough private virtual “teamspeak” servers now that the Asian army of ssh login-tries focusses on that too. The attacks began immediately when the server was online. Here’s the small statistics for the first 48 hours: There were 2476 ssh login attempts and the top three are
- root (1017)
- teamspeak (631)
- ftp (77)
So people out there, make sure you don’t allow ssh-login by password at all!
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