I have a small 220 Mb VPS and thought I could put it to use as a slave DNS server using Debian wheezy. It was an interesting exercise seeing what could or could not run in such a small VPS and this is a bit of a brain dump FWIW. I tried using nginx with just fcgiwrap but it would mean adding "#!/usr/bin/php5-cgi" to a couple of dozen first run PHP scripts. There is no way php-fpm would run along with MySQL and Bind so I ended up installing lighttpd just to run the ISPConfig CP and I only had to alter one file... Code: chmod 640 /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/lib/config.inc.php so that lighttpd running as www-data could access it (the ispconfig user belongs to the www-data group on Debian/Ubuntu systems). Yes, pure CGI (not FastCGI) is pretty slow but it works. I also added just postfix on it's own so the system could send out any email notices. Here is a list of running services... Code: ~ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 225280 111036 114244 0 0 0 -/+ buffers/cache: 111036 114244 Swap: 524288 0 524288 ~ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.3 10608 824 ? Ss Mar31 0:00 init [2] root 3245 0.0 0.7 58808 1640 ? Sl Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -c5 bind 3269 0.0 5.2 86940 11760 ? Ssl Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/named -u bind root 3294 0.0 0.4 18836 952 ? Ss Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron www-data 3315 0.0 1.1 80444 2512 ? S Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf root 3345 0.0 0.2 4132 652 ? S Mar31 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe mysql 3657 0.0 4.2 63528 9472 ? Sl Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --plugin-dir=/usr/lib/mysql/plugin --user=m root 3865 0.0 1.0 37744 2428 ? Ss Mar31 0:00 /usr/lib/postfix/master postfix 3866 0.0 1.0 39864 2376 ? S Mar31 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u root 3882 0.0 0.4 40936 928 ? Ss Mar31 0:00 pure-ftpd (SERVER) root 3945 0.0 0.5 41640 1212 ? Ss Mar31 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd postfix 5925 0.0 1.0 39812 2336 ? S Mar31 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u -c root 5969 0.0 1.6 69432 3812 ? Ss 00:55 0:00 sshd: root@pts/0 root 5971 0.0 0.8 17900 2024 pts/0 Ss 00:55 0:00 -bash root 5984 0.0 0.4 15260 1092 pts/0 R+ 00:59 0:00 ps aux I had to disable InnoDB for Mysql so here is it's my.cnf... Code: [client] user = MYSQL_USERNAME password = MYSQL_PASSWORD port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock [mysqld] default-storage-engine = myisam port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock key_buffer_size = 16K max_allowed_packet = 1M table_open_cache = 4 sort_buffer_size = 64K read_buffer_size = 256K read_rnd_buffer_size = 256K net_buffer_length = 2K thread_stack = 128K server-id = 1 general_log = 1 general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log long_query_time = 2 log-queries-not-using-indexes ignore_builtin-innodb skip-external-locking [mysqldump] quick max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] no-auto-rehash [myisamchk] key_buffer_size = 8M sort_buffer_size = 8M [mysqlhotcopy] interactive-timeout and the lighttpd conf... Code: server.modules = ( "mod_access", "mod_alias", "mod_compress", "mod_redirect", # "mod_rewrite", ) server.document-root = "/var/www" server.upload-dirs = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" ) server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log" server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid" server.username = "www-data" server.groupname = "www-data" server.port = 80 index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.lighttpd.html" ) url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc", ".ht" ) static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" ) cgi.assign = ( ".php" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi" ) compress.cache-dir = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/" compress.filetype = ( "application/javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" ) $HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(js|css|gif|jpg|png|ico|txt|swf|html|htm)$" { expire.url = ( "" => "access 3 days" ) } $HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(gif|jpe?g|png|htc|css|js|ico)$" { accesslog.filename = "/dev/null" } $SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" { ssl.engine = "enable" ssl.pemfile = "/etc/ssl/private/lighttpd.pem" ssl.cipher-list = "ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM" ssl.honor-cipher-order = "enable" server.document-root = "/usr/local/ispconfig/interface/web" } # default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl" include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl" plus these lighttpd modules enabled... Code: ~ ls /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/* -1 /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/05-auth.conf@ /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-accesslog.conf@ /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi.conf@ /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-expire.conf@ /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/50-phpmyadmin.conf@ And slightly related is I had an emergency where our main mailserver leaked spam via a compromised user account so to help some clients avoid the blacklisting I wanted to set up an alternate outgoing-only SMTP server. I got another even smaller 128Mb VPS (from RamNode with 3Gb SSD) and tried to install postfix but I am more familiar with courier-mta. I ended up using a SSH tunnel back to our main server 10,000 Km away for MySQL access, to avoid running MySQL with a lot of data locally, and to my surprise it came together after a couple of hours work and is currently using only 15Mb of ram! I think my point is that if ISPConfig could work with SQLite then by using lighttpd+CGI and courier-mta/imap with perhaps MaraDNS then it would be possible to run a few dozen clients out of a $20/yr VPS. And the neat point about these ultra cheap VPS is that they obviously come with an IP and most hosting providers charge more than $20 per year (and up to double that) for just one extra IP!
So I could add and manage the actual slave zones via ISPConfig. I didn't want to MySQL replicate a huge amount of otherwise useless (to this server) database content and so far my tests with mirroring ISPConfig to other servers has not been very satisfactory. I'm still not clear on how to manage other servers from a single centralised instance of ISPConfig and I needed this particular slave server up and running asap and using lighttpd and its non-fast CGI module was the quickest path to get it all working on such a small VPS.
