User Services

This page contains details of services which we offer to our users:

More services might be added later, depending upon suggestions, user-feedback and demands.

Reverse DNS

Each user has been given three IP addresses, as described upon the networking page.

To ease maintainance of the reverse DNS entries of these IP addresses the xen-shell tool has an "rdns" command which may be used to manipulate the reverse DNS entries of any of your IP addresses.

Changes are detected once an hour, although due to the way that DNS works they may take longer to propogate.


rsync backup space

There is a small amount of space allocated for each user which may be used as a local backup source.

What is a local backup source? It is one that is local to the host machine. It is not backed up remotely. It is not guaranteed to survive if there is a hardware problem, and it is primarily offered as a convience.

To access your backup space you must connect from your Xen guest, and you must have previously confirmed a password to use with it.

Assuming that you are user skx you can backup the /etc directory by running:

export RSYNC_PASSWORD=blah
rsync --numeric-ids -aHPS /etc skx.backup.xen-hosting.net::skx/

Rather than storing a password in an environmental variable you can also store it in a file:

echo "mysecretpassw0rd" >~/.rsync-pass
chmod 700 ~/.rsync-pass

Then the copy becomes:

rsync --password-file=~/.rsync-pass --numeric-ids -aHPS  /etc \
      skx.backup.xen-hosting.net::skx/

To restore files you simply reverse the arguments, as you would expect.