BitFolk Announcements January 2011

announce@mailman.bitfolk.com

1 participants
8 discussions

2011-02-26 1700Z onwards - scheduled maintenance for customers on curacao, faustino, kahlua, obstler, urquell

by Andy Smith

Hi, On the evening of Saturday 26th February 2011 starting from about 1700Z we will be taking part in maintenance to completely re-rack all servers in one suite. Goals of this maintenance: - Turn the rack around 180 degrees to improve air flow based on the location of cold air ingress from the under-floor air conditioning. - Adjust rack posts to allow better air flow up through the rack. - Re-rack servers in a way that doesn't impede air flow. - Install new power metering equipment. This is expected to take several hours. It's difficult to be more specific because it depends on how fast we are able to work; obviously we will be working as fast as is safely possible. Customers on the following servers will be affected because these servers are in the rack that we'll be working on: - curacao - kahlua - obstler - urquell Additionally, - faustino which is currently in a different suite will be powered off and moved. This outage will be much shorter - should be no more than 30 minutes maximum. This will be done after the other work is completed so it's not possible to specify a time. How to find out which server you are on: https://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_3_Which_piece_of_actual_h… We will be performing a clean shut down of all VPSes, followed by a boot again when servers are re-racked. The following BitFolk services will be unavailable during the maintenance: - The old primary DNS resolver, 212.13.194.71 - apt-cacher - cacti - tracker - wiki The resolver outage means that it's important that all customers configure use of the new resolvers that were announced here: http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20110124.233915.2c058600.en.html Failure to do this will lead to very poor network performance during the outage, because your first resolver will not respond at all. If you are otherwise unaffected by the maintenance and assuming you configure the new resolvers, the absence of the above services should not impact the operation of your VPS. We can't alter the date/time of the maintenance, but if this timing is disastrous for you then please let support(a)bitfolk.com know and me may be able to accommodate a move of your VPS to a server that will be unaffected. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 10 months

IMPORTANT: New DNS resolvers available

by Andy Smith

Hi, You may recall recently that there was a period of poor network performance because the customer DNS resolver on 212.13.194.71 was overloaded: http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20110102.221800.b90128dc.en.html In that thread I promised to provision a new dedicated resolver to avoid a re-occurrence of the issue. Instead I took the opportunity to provision several new resolver hosts in a cluster with fail over for the service IPs. All customers should change their resolvers from: 212.13.194.71 212.13.194.96 to: 85.119.80.232 85.119.80.233 There's some maintenance coming up in February (details in a separate email, shortly) which will take 212.13.194.71 offline for several hours. It's therefore important that you change to using the new resolvers before this time, otherwise you will experience severe network performance problems. If you have any questions please direct to users list or support(a)bitfolk.com. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 10 months

TOR and BitTorrent

by Andy Smith

Hello, In the last few months there's been an increase in the number of notices of claimed infringement we have received from various companies acting on behalf of rights owners such as Columbia Pictures, CBS, etc.. A number of times this has been traced back to customers running TOR exit nodes. Assuming that you do not wish to trigger these allegations, I would suggest that those operating TOR exit nodes at BitFolk might like to consider whether they want to all people to be using BitTorrent through their node. Or indeed whether they want to be running an exit node at all (as opposed to a routing node which only talks to other TOR nodes). Some further information: http://www.chrisbrunner.com/2006/07/09/why-you-shouldnt-run-bittorrent-over… Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 11 months

Backups source IP and NFS host changed

by Andy Smith

Hello, As of last night, the backups source IP and NFS host address which were both formerly 212.13.194.71 have been changed to 85.119.80.241 [*]. Only a couple of customers appear to have restricted the IP that the backups can be done from, and I'll be contacting them directly today. Those of you who access your backups over read-only NFS will need to mount them from 85.119.80.241 instead of 212.13.194.71 (look in your /etc/fstab). Cheers, Andy [*] This is an IP from our new allocation: http://is.gd/kmhx8 Despite looking nothing like the other one it is actually still in the same facility. We will be trying to keep all BitFolk infrastructure inside 85.119.80.0/23. -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 11 months

2011-01-06 17:30Z - "at risk" notification for faustino.bitfolk.com

by Andy Smith

Hello, faustino.bitfolk.com has a hard disk on its way to death and so I will be replacing it tomorrow sometime between 17:30 and 18:30. Rebuild will take a few hours after that. I'm not expecting there to be any down time or disruption. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 11 months

2011-01-03 - Network incident affected multiple servers

by Andy Smith

Hello, Between about 23:39 and 23:46Z last night, 3rd January, multiple servers became unreachable or suffered extremely poor networking performance. Servers particularly affected were: barbar kahlua obstler urquell But all networking was affected to some extent, if only through increased latency. It appears to have been a denial of service attack of around 350Mbps / 250Kpps. Source IPs were spoofed and multiple destination IPs were targeted. I am continuing to work with our upstream network provider on this. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting You dont have to be illiterate to use the Internet, but it help's. -- Mike Bristow

13 years, 12 months

Heavy load on DNS resolver caused poor performance earlier today

by Andy Smith

Hi, Intermittently between approximately 16:00 and 21:00Z today (2nd Jan), a host which runs one of BitFolk's caching DNS resolvers (212.13.194.71) was overloaded, causing poor performance for many of you. The cause was recent changes in the data transfer monitoring scripts as previously discussed and detailed in: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/15 It seems that the more heavyweight method of estimating data transfer is in some cases slow enough to still be running when the next scheduled invocation of the script runs, causing both to run slower, and the problem to spiral. Since no hosts or critical services were actually reported down, we weren't made aware of the issue as quickly as might have been desired. I have now made some modifications: - It's now not possible for multiple copies of these scripts to run at once. - If system load is too high then the expensive checks will now be skipped entirely. There is also the fact that this host is simply doing too much - it shouldn't be running these scripts in addition to being a resolver. In the next few days I will be provisioning an additional resolver and eventually this one will be retired. Apologies for any disruption this may have caused for you. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 12 months

New read-only announcements list now available

by Andy Smith

Hi, There's been a request for a read-only announcements list for BitFolk, so I have decided to try this out. I've created the "announce" list: https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce In future any sort of announcement that I would normally send to the "users" list will instead be directed to "announce", and automatically copied to the "users" list. The "announce" list will not accept any discussion, and posts sent through it will have Reply-To set to the "users" list. Therefore if you're happy with the content and level of traffic on the "users" list you need not do anything, as all announcements will continue to end up there. If on the other hand you would prefer to only see announcements from BitFolk and not any user issues, following comments or debate, you may wish to subscribe to "announce" and remove yourself from "users". Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 12 months

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BitFolk Announcements January 2011