Gandi provides you with a virtual server that you have ordered to fit your needs. Along with the advantages of a virtual dedicated server comes the responsibility of maintaining the system, however. Gandi cannot directly intervene in the administration of your server, or in correcting mistakes, debugging your code or providing assistance in the configuration of your server.

• My websites are no longer visible on the web!
  1. Verify that your apache server is looking for your websites on the right disk. You may have accidentally switched disks in your apache2 package configuration and submitted the configuration update. This would cause your apache server to look in the wrong location for the website files.
  2. Verify that your server has not been stopped. You may have stopped your server by accident, or have forgotten that you have stopped it.

• I can't upload files via FTP!
  1. Verify that you are using the correct connection codes. see: Uploading files to your server using FTP
  2. Verify that you have specified that your FRP client use "passive" mode.

• I need PHP 5.2.4 at least or even 5.3, I have only PHP 5.2.3 !

You have to migrate on the new Gandi AI version (2011) in order to upgrade the modules as PHP, the old Gandi AI can provide PHP up to 5.2.3 only.

• Problems logging in

See Connecting to your server

• My server is not responding !

See Using the emergency console.

• I get the message "E: Couldn't find package" when installing an application

See using apt-get for deb based distribution (like Debian or Ubuntu). For rpm based distribution, you will have to use the dedicated tool from the distribution : yum for Fedora, CentOS, urpmi for Mandriva, …

• I cannot send files on my remote server !

See How to upload files

• I get the message WARNING;: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! when I try to connect to my server
  1. if you didn't change anything on your server, this could indicate that your server was compromised. Use the emergency console to connect to your server. Another solution could be to stop the server and attach the system disk to another server to check if someone has broke into your server.
  2. if you delete a virtual server and created a new one which get the same IP address to the previous one, you can safely remove the public key store locally in your keychain :

ssh-keygen -R your_ip_address

• I can not find the "XXXX" module in the operating system on my server.

here : Updating kernel modules.

• I have an error when updating .deb package made by Gandi

here : How to fix error when updating packages.

• How to configure gandi-config service in gandi-hosting-vm package ?

The gandi-hosting-vm package is installed by default on all OS image prepared by our technical team. It install files in their correct path and you can modify its behavior at boot time with this config file : /etc/sysconfig/gandi. More information in : http://lacuisinedegandi.net/post/2010/10/28/Modification-des-OS-standards-par-Gandi

• The resize2fs command did nothing on my VPS when I increased the size of a disk, df -h returns me the same size !

Update the gandi-hosting-vm package using Gandi APT sources
Stop / start your VPS in two times on the control panel
Do the procedure described on our wiki again

• I try to detach a disk from my server and the operation is still in error

When detaching a disk and if no incident on our hosting plaform has been published, the main cause is a running application still using files on the currently detaching disk. When the kernel cannot release the disk to the Xen subsystem, it print a message in the 'dmesg' output.

By using either 'lsof' of 'fuser' command, you can try to identify which process in memory is using the disk and blocking the detach operation.

• On CentOS, iSCSI errors appear every second in the logs, after a while the disk is full

CentOS is installing by default iscsi and iscsid, you can remove those packages, or just stop it, that will have no impact on the VPS, we use it for the backend but not on the VPS, this will avoid the logs errors.

• On CentOS, Gsync returns errors, it missed some python dependances : "ImportError: No module named ctypes"

It is necessary to follow this process :

- install & activate the EPEL repository - install the python-ctypes package

And Gsync works ! (Thank to Christophe Gimenez for the report).

• I upgraded the kernel of my VPS, the VPS crashes, I have a data disk formatted using XFS

The new kernels are not supporting XFS anymore, you have to create a new disk on our platform which will be formatted as Ext4, then transfer your files.

• I have the error message : 'name or service unknown' whenever I try to connect to my server

You did not use the correct IP address for your server or the server does not exist behind this IP address. Check the status of your server in your administration page on the site. |

• Why my server information page only provide graph about CPU/disk/network and not the memory ?

Input/ouput resources are collected by our Xen infrastructure, the use of your RAM have to be done from a program inside your virtuel server. More details : ici|

• Can I use my own kernel ?

The kernel used by a server at boot is provided by the Xen infrastructure. Therefore kernel installed by package managment or even local compilation could not be used to boot a server. The Gandi team provide a set of kernel which you can associate with your kernel. See the next entry for choosing the kernel version.

• How to update the kernel version of my server ?

The kernel used by a server at boot is associated with the 'main' disk. This disk is shown with a 'Boot disk' checked in the disk list in the server detail page in the hosting customer account. In the detailled page of this disk - after clicking on the disk name-, you will be able to choose a kernel version. After validating the operation, you will have to stop and start your virtual server.

• gsync is not enable to backup my files ?

This behavior is the result of the configuration of the file system about inotify options. These options allow the filesystem driver to warn the kernel about change in a directory that gsync watches. If the value of these options are to low, gsync will not backup completly the directory.

If your server is GandiAI please contact the support which will configure your server. If your server is in expert mode, please add these options to the /etc/sysctl.conf file :

fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 128
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 8192
fs.inotify.max_queued_events = 16384

• I get "end-request: I/O error, dev xvdx , sector xxxxxxx" on each disk using a 2.6.36 kernel

"Write barriers" are part of a mechanism used by file systems to guarantee that some kind of I/O request are send to the disk in a specific order. The current implementation is not efficient et is currently rewritten.Their performance impact is big for some rare case of corruption when the server is crashing at the wrong moment. LVM ("device-mapper") and our current Xen setup does not support this feature.

When the file system is mounted it tries to detect the disk ability to handle this feature by setting a write barrier. The erreur (standard) return by the 'disk' subsystem is systematicaly registered in the request management system and generate this log entry as well as the "JBD: barrier-based sync failed on XXX" message. These messages can be ignored.

If the error message appears outside of the previous context (during the boot, when disk are attached to the server) or following another kind of message you should investigate further.

• I can not open /dev/xvda (as stated in the disk resize process) ?

After april 2011, Gandi is using another storage infrastructure along the old one based on LVM. In the new model the main disk of your server does not contains any partition table anymore. The file system if created directly in the /dev/xvda1 disk.

If the file /proc/partitions does not contain /dev/xvda but only /dev/xvda1 you are on this new storage infrastructure. In this case simply resize the file system on /dev/xvda1 using :

resize2fs /dev/xvda1

This comande may return an error telling you to checking the filesystem before resizing.

• How long is the delay between an official release of a new version of a distro (e.g. Ubuntu) and Gandi offering it for installation on new VPSes ?

We mainly focus on Long Time Support version of Ubuntu (10.04 at the moment) which have 5 years upstream support. Our local mirror of Ubuntu package tree is updated each day. So a new release will be available the next. About OS image usable to create server, we try to release an image in both architecture (32 and 64 bits) in both of our datacenter no more than one week after the official Ubuntu release. This give us time to properly create the image and to wait a couple of days for any major bug discovery. This is not as fast with the RPM distribution.

• I see some CPUs in the /proc/cpuinfo file, does it correspond to my virtual cores ?

What you see is in fact the physical CPUs of the physical machine. To see your virtual CPU cores, we invite you to use the "top" command, then type on the "1" key in order to see separate CPU cores in top.