BitFolk Announcements March 2011

announce@mailman.bitfolk.com

1 participants
8 discussions

Individual snapshot disk usage report added to panel/backups

by Andy Smith

Hi, We've added a report of each snapshot's disk usage to: https://panel.bitfolk.com/backups/ This will make it easier for you to spot which snapshot introduced lots of files, for example. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

Clarification regarding "reinstall on system compromise" has been added to Terms and Conditions

by Andy Smith

Hello, A clarification has today been added to BitFolk's Terms and Conditions: http://bitfolk.com/policy/terms.html * BitFolk reserves the right to require that The Customer perform a reinstall of The Service if at any time BitFolk believes that The Service has been seriously compromised. Whether the compromise is serious enough to require reinstall will be at BitFolk's sole discretion. I refer to this as a clarification because it has always been the case that BitFolk has required reinstallation of seriously compromised VPSes. This has previously been enforced under the "block or terminate service at any time for any reason" clause, but it was suggested that it would be preferable to explicitly list it, and I agree with that suggestion. I hope you will agree in any case that responsible systems administration practice is to reinstall when a root-level compromise is discovered or strongly suspected. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

Problems with the authoritative nameservers and names with \032 in them

by Andy Smith

Hello, It was brought to my attention earlier today that a zone file correctly loaded into a customer's BIND nameserver and transferred to BitFolk's servers was not being served correctly by two of the servers. On further investigation it seems that there's some bug in PowerDNS regarding DNS names (the bit on the left hand side) with "\032" in them. Last year I fixed a bug in the sqlite backend of PowerDNS regarding incorrect escaping of "\", which had prevented "\032" and anything else with "\" in it being stored correctly as DNS content (the right hand side). I'm not yet sure if this is related or more fundamental. I've reported the bug. At the moment the impact is that if you have a DNS zone with something like this in it: foo\032bar._http._tcp SRV 0 0 10 baz.example.com. then it will get stored in b.authns.bitfolk.com and c.authns.bitfolk.com as: foo bar._http._tcp SRV 0 0 10 baz.example.com. This is incorrect. BIND servers taking the same AXFR would store "foo\032bar._http._tcp". Anything correctly querying for "foo\032bar._http._tcp" will not get answers from the affected servers. Therefore for the moment if you have zones that use these types of record on the left hand side, you should not delegate them to {b,c}.authns.bitfolk.com. "\032" on the right hand side is okay. If you use PowerDNS yourselves I'd be interested to know if you can replicate this with backends other than gsqlite (e.g. gmysql or gpsql), as this would indicate whether it's a problem with the gsqlite backend or something else. FWIW this type of DNS name seems to be used for DNS-based service discovery: http://www.dns-sd.org/ Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

How to verify the SSH fingerprints of BitFolk's hosts

by Andy Smith

Hello, When connecting via SSH to a BitFolk host for the first time (e.g. your Xen Shell), you may be wondering how to verify that the SSH fingerprint is genuine. To assist you in this, a list of them has been securely published and also uploaded into the OpenPGP web of trust. Please see: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Verifying_BitFolk%27s_SSH_fingerprints for more details. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

Cacti bandwidth graphs with "total transferred" figures now available

by Andy Smith

Hello, Recently it was pointed out that the Cacti bandwidth graphs that BitFolk provides do not contain a figure for the total data transferred in/out. It turns out that the graph template was poorly chosen, since a template with this information does already exist. Here's an example of the style of bandwidth graph almost all of you have: http://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/graph_910.html Here's an example of one with total transferred figures: http://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/graph_2472.html Unfortunately it is not possible to just switch existing graphs to the different template. So, if it seems like something you'd like to have, please send an email to support(a)bitfolk.com asking for new bandwidth graphs. You can of course always work out roughly what the figures would be, from the average rate figures: $ units '10.03kilobit/sec' 'megabytes/day' * 108.324 / 0.0092315646 Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

BitFolk's Ubuntu VPSes do not run update-grub after a kernel install/upgrade

by Andy Smith

Hello, A while back someone pointed out to me that BitFolk's Ubuntu VPSes don't run update-grub after a kernel upgrade/install. This can lead to some annoyance if you reboot expecting a new kernel, or even if you removed the one that you were using before. We don't tend to keep test VPSes around for very long, so I didn't notice this myself. The reason for it is that /etc/kernel-img.conf does not contain: postinst_hook = update-grub postrm_hook = update-grub So if you want update-grub to be run after upgrade/install/removal, you should add the above to the file. The default install images have now had this set. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

No more support for Gentoo

by Andy Smith

Hi folks, I've had to remove support for Gentoo because I don't know how to compile a kernel in Gentoo that has Xen support; I'm not a Gentoo user and am not willing/able to put the time in at the moment to learn that. Hardly anyone wants Gentoo[1] so it's hard to justify. This doesn't mean that you can't install Gentoo. There are still some customers at BitFolk using Gentoo, and I find it hard to believe that you can't compile a Xen kernel "the Gentoo way", I just don't personally know how. I'm not willing to call Gentoo supported when the only way I know to get it going is to copy in a kernel and initrd from elsewhere. If you know better and are willing to write a wiki article[2] giving step by step instructions on how to compile a Xen kernel "the Gentoo way" then firstly, some other customers would be very happy, because they don't seem to know either; and secondly, I'd appreciate that a lot too because I'll feel comfortable offering Gentoo as a supported option again. If the article is of good quality I may also be convinced to give you some service credit. Cheers, Andy [1] http://strugglers.net/~andy/bitfolk/distros.html [2] https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Compiling_a_Xen_kernel_under_Gentoo for example? Whatever you think is best. -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

2010-03-08 ~0253Z - Unscheduled power cycle of faustino

by Andy Smith

Hi, Short version: faustino had a kernel panic that seems related to filesystem corruption, was power cycled, fscked and checked, VPSes started again. Long version: At approximately 0250Z this morning I was alerted that an infrastructure VPS on host faustino was not responding. On investigation it had crashed with a kernel error on the host machine itself. Attempting to restart the VPS caused more kernel errors and eventually a lock up, so it was necessary to power cycle the host. After the host booted I carried out a little bit more investigation before starting VPSes again. It seems that the host encountered a filesystem error in its /var filesystem which the xend process was writing to, which in turn crashed one of the VPSes (our infrastructure one). On boot, the /var device had undergone some fsck repair. I forced a fsck of all filesystems on the host (i.e. ours, not yours) and they all came back clean. I then started the infrastructure VPS which had crashed before, and this started up without issue. I then, at ~0306Z, issued the command to start up all customer VPSes, and this is still taking place. In fact it just finished as of ~0321Z. System load will be heavy for a while as every VPS will be doing its own fsck. I hope that the root cause of this issue was filesystem corruption, and it is now behind us. It could be a few other things though. The RAM was replaced on 26th February and could be at fault. It could also be a problem with the RAID controller. There's no real evidence of any of that yet, so I'm going to have to just keep an eye on things. However if further problems present themselves then we do have a spare server almost identical to faustino which we will swap the disks into, or replace other parts if a clear culprit is suggested. Please accept my apologies for the disruption. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

13 years, 1 month

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BitFolk Announcements March 2011