

Slicehost: Boot your slices with your own custom kernel - notmyname
http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/10/27/boot-your-slices-with-your-own-custom-kernel-beta

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StavrosK
Unfortunately, Slicehost is growing more and more irrelevant. I'll just have
to bite the bullet and migrate the rest of my servers to linode...

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askedrelic
I do agree. I migrated my personal server after the RAM increase at Linode and
all of my company's servers as well.

I can't think of any other new features SliceHost has rolled out in the last 6
months.

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StavrosK
Hmm, how did you migrate? I have so many sites and old cruft that anything
short of a clone of the VM will fail horribly...

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askedrelic
Short answer: Build scripts + standard layout.

(I'm a Debian guy) I used 'dpkg -l' to check what all I had currently
installed and narrowed down what packages I was still using. Check /etc/init.d
for start up scripts. Hard files on disk are easy to migrate, live migrating
MySQL data is more tricky, but my personal sites don't really have that much
going on. I always keep a .tar.gz of the entire server for future reference.

Move over as much as possible and try to get things running. Save your
.bash_history and get a build script going. Pull any /etc/ config files you
are missing. Reinstall your required packages. Test your new site via editing
/etc/hosts, then move the DNS. Watch your logs and look for 404 erors for
files you didn't copy over correctly.

It takes time, but if you use an organized and repeatable process, it can take
less time in the future.

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akira410
Same here. I also hacked up (with Linode) a Linode Stack Script (for those
that do not know, it's basically a fancy bash script that gets run upon
deployment.)

It goes through the trouble of installing all of my various dpkg dependencies,
setting up mysql, downloading and compiling rails and nginx w/ passenger, as
well as setting up my bash prompt.

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points
wow you have been able to do this on linode for years :/

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ahi
But with slicehost you get to pay twice as much. I honestly thought slicehost
had been killed off when they were bought by rackspace.

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davidw
It's amazing how much you can coast on momentum.

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sammcd
I am very surprised that Slicehost is still being updated. I thought that
after the acquisition RackSpace was purposefully not updating Slicehost to get
more customers to use their RackSpace branded version

This update make me wonder if Rackspace is seeing that there was more to
slicehost then just the platform, and maybe considering focusing on the
slicehost brand.

I still love the Slicehost docs and use them even though I'm on linode. If it
looked liek Slicehost wasn't being ignored I would gladly move back.

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dualboot
Maybe I'm nuts but Slicehost for me still has the best stability of the
various VM providers I use.

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joeyh
well, lack of that is why I left slicehost, but even EC2 allows custom kernels
now. So a bit late, but glad people are seeing this as the important feature
it is -- for quick security response if nothing else.

