Newbie Question

[steve]

Hello Admin, UncleSal.

I'm new to Prometeus but liking it so far. A couple of basic questions if I may (sorry if they are *basic*, I'm fairly new at provisioning VPS nodes)...

1) Do you have any nodes setup that we can use as ntpd time servers or should we just go with something out of the nearest server pool?
2) The Ubuntu 12.04 image (maybe others) seem to be issuing lots of messages like...
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
... everytime I use apt-get. I've not come across that before when setting up VMs locally from ISO images. Do I need to install/setup something regarding locales on vps images?

Update1: solved 2) by doing an "apt-get install language-pack-en-base" and then "sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales". That's one down, but has left me with a load of English locales I don't need -- but at least things are cleaner now.

Update2: Now I'm thinking that I don't need to manage the time at all with ntpd as it's likely taken care of on the host OS right?

Many thanks in advance & it's nice to find a VPS provider with an open forum!

[Admin]

Hello Steve !

I see you solved most of your problems A problem that doesnt solve itself does not merit your attention
Time management is different depending on the virtualization.
On OpenVZ you can only set your time zone with a bit of hacking. On the others you can use the "hardware" clock (emulated by the host) or a NTP time server.

[steve]

Hello Admin.

Just posting the solution to setting the timezone (as a reminder for myself)... "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata".

Now, a new question: if I do a "netstat -tupan" I see that named is listening on the external IP address of the VPS, not just on the loopback address. As I'm only using the server for a smalll, low-frequency-of-update redis instance, I can't really think of any need for the external bindings -- can you let me know what, if anything, needs access to the named DNS service on the external IP address? Can I safely remove the external bindings from the named config file?

Thanks!

[Admin]

Hello !

I usually remove named from OS since it is a known security troublemaker and is not really needed if you can easily use an external DNS even if you do hosting as keeping your DNS in another location gives more options for redundancy.

[steve]

Right, I'll uninstall bind9 then. Thanks!