GeekISP FAQ - The five questions posted most recently:

How do I setup a user for database access?

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:05:00 GMT

First, create a new database. Once you've done this, control_mysql automatically creates a database user with the same name as your system username. The password is set to a random value. To set the password to something you like, do:

control_mysql password user_name

It will prompt you to enter a password twice.

New users can be created with the 'adduser' command to control_mysql, i.e.:

control_mysql adduser new_user_name

You can then use the standard MySQL grant system to give this user access to tables in your databases.� For example:

$ mysql -u user_name -h db -p

mysql> grant all privileges on my_new_db.* to new_user_name@'%'

How do I add a new database?

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:54:00 GMT

Simply log into the shell server and use the control_mysql script:

/usr/local/bin/control_mysql add my_new_db

If this is the first database you're adding, it will also create a new database user for you.� If your login is 'bob', your new DB user will also be named 'bob'.� From there, you can set the password for 'bob' and go about working with your database:

/usr/local/bin/control_mysql password bob

What's the SSH fingerprint of the shell server?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:23:00 GMT

The shell server has 2 SSH keys, and their fingerprints are:

RSA: 95:bf:73:35:ca:73:39:8d:92:ea:0f:0c:90:f8:30:3e
DSA: 7e:16:65:db:ce:34:36:98:59:f6:df:c4:8f:2a:39:0b

How do I unsubscribe from your announce@ mailing list?

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:18:00 GMT

To unsubscribe, simply send a blank email to:

announce-unsubscribe@geekisp.com

Be sure to send that mail from the account on which you're receiving messages. The mailing list system will send you a confirmation email, and once confirmed, you will be removed from the list.

If you're unable to successfully unsubscribe, send an email to support@geekisp.com and we'll try to remove you manually.

How does Tomcat work at GeekISP?

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:28:00 GMT

Tomcat support at GeekISP is pretty straightforward. First of all, Tomcat is an optional, ala carte service. Please check the ala carte page for the latest prices. If you'd like to add Tomcat service for a particular domain, just email support requesting it.

When Tomcat is enabled, there are several options in how its set up. By default, we now map your entire domain onto Tomcat, but that's not strictly required - we could only map a portion of your URL space.

For instance if you wanted only JSP files to be served by Tomcat, that's very easy to do. If you were planning a mixed deployment (i.e. some files served by Tomcat, some by Apache), just tell us how you'd like it configured. We use mod_jk to forward requests from Apache to Tomcat, so any simple url mapping is possible. For instance:

Keep PHP files on Apache:

*.php

Send anything in the /myapp/ url to Tomcat:

/myapp/*

Any basic pattern like that is easy to support. While the above is possible, we do highly recommend that you devote your entire domain to Tomcat to simplify deployment. If you have a main site (example.com) and want to add a few apps in support of your existing site, it may be simpler to configure 'java.example.com' and deploy your apps there.

Deployment is done via WAR files automatically. Assuming you have a standard setup (i.e. all URLs are mapped to Tomcat) for your example.com domain, you would deploy files like so:

To setup an application to serve the '/' URL for your domain (i.e. the default app), drop a file named ROOT.war into your ~/www.example.com directory.
If you want another app to handle /myapp, just drop a WAR named myapp.war into ~/www.example.com.
Note that your 'htdocs' and 'cgi-bin' directories are not used in this case, since all files are served from the contents of the WAR files.

On the backend, we run a single shared Tomcat instance, but we have redundant configurations running across several web servers. Sessions are sticky, but not replicated. That means that after the first request is served, a user will only be connected to a single Tomcat backend unless a Tomcat server should go down.