My First VPS Related Support Chat

We launched a VPS offering recently and anyone who has signed up as gone about their own way and never needed to talk to us.  The few that did need some help never ran into me it was usually Cody our resident expert on everything related to our VPS offering.

The day finally came when I had to help someone and put my expertise to the test and eventually I did come through with flying colors:

The user was attempting to run some sort of MMO on their VPS or at least that’s what I think it was anyways.

The user had no experience with Linux what so ever so my suggestions of links to install Java would be futile in this case.  I would need to actually install Java for the user so that they could now work on running their actual application and not the setup.

I proceeded to login to their VM via the console access within HyperVM.  This seemed like the most logical way to help the user it would be a quick wget and ./file.bin.

I proceeded to install the latest version of JRE and then the users application would still not work.  I was stumped now and asked the user if there were install instructions.  He linked me to a page that included a brief tutorial on installing things that are easy as pie.  It did not include anything about the java portion which was the issue for this user.

I dug through the read me and finally found some things that were required that are not part of Java by default.  I proceeded to download them and added them to the classpath of java and figured that should be the end of it.  Unfortunately that was not the case at all and it seemingly could not find the java files.

I continued to play around with this without much luck with the user asking more questions about how to do various things in Linux.  It was like being quizzed on the operating system I use everyday and I think I did alright all things considered (I use google on pretty much everything).

After about an hour and a half of talking to the user and playing around with this I finally looked at the scripts that were being ran to run the application.  To my surprise they were defining their own class path which did not include any mention of the files that were also required.  I quickly added a search for all .jar in the dist folder for the application.  To my surprise it actually ran now!  So much for those instructions provided and assuming the application was even setup right for Linux.  In fact I think it’s actually natively windows so here’s hoping it runs for the user.

Well here’s hoping the next person has an easier problem that I can solve in under 15 minutes :)  Or at least one that touches on my knowledge opposed to problems with obscure program  that are java based and does not even have an official support forum anymore and google provides little help as well.

Well off to play some Mario Kart Wii and let others deal with strange problems.