Hi,
Being able to store multiple contacts has been a long-requested
feature:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/22
The first phase of this work has now been deployed to the panel web
site. That's just the ability to store and edit multiple contact
records.
If you visit:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/contacts/#toc-address-book
you'll be able to add/change/remove contact records.
These aren't very useful though until the other parts of BitFolk's
infrastructure can make use of them, and most of that work is still
to come.
The most common use of a different contact is for
monitoring/alerting, so that has been implemented first. You can
control who gets alerts by creating contact records and assigning
them to the "Alerting" role.
For those of you who have monitoring set up:
- If you have no contacts assigned to the "Alerting" role then
alerts will go to your main customer record.
- If you have at least one contact in the "Alerting" role then
alerts will go there instead. Each contact will get a copy.
- Everyone who already had a different email address set in our
monitoring has had a contact created and assigned to the
"Alerting" role for this purpose, so no action needs to be taken
to keep things behaving the same as they did before.
Other common requests for alternate contact details were for billing
and data transfer reports. These roles will be added as soon as the
relevant BitFolk systems are made to support them.
In the mean time I would suggest one useful thing to do is for
people who care about being contacted in an emergency to add at
least one contact to the "emergency" role, with a mobile phone
number and/or email address that is not hosted on your VPS. We would
only use those details to contact you if we really needed to, when
your main email address does not seem to be working.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
TL;DR version:
A few customers will see new bandwidth graphs appearing in their
Cacti, which can be found at https://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/
The already-existing graphs will continue to run for a while and
then will cease to be updated. The new graph will become your
primary bandwidth graph.
This is because some high-bandwidth users need to have graphs based
on 64-bit counters, not 32-bit, in order to accurately measure
bandwidth use.
It may result in slightly higher values being reported in Cacti, but
this is merely correcting previous under-reporting. Monthly totals
as presented in our emailed data transfer reports were/are correct.
Longer version:
While investigating some recent discrepancies between the different
systems we have for accounting for customer data transfer, I
discovered that all of our bandwidth graphs were using 32-bit SNMP
counters.
A 32-bit unsigned counter has a maximum value of 4,294,967,295. With
5 minute sampling, that means that an interface seeing around
114Megabit/sec of traffic will reach 4,294,967,295 and wrap around
to zero again before the counter can be read.
As a result, a few customers who routinely use large amounts of
bandwidth have Cacti graphs that are under-reporting their usage.
Here is an example of a graph based on 32-bit counters:
http://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/graph_5062.html
Here is the same interface graphed from 64-bit counters:
http://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/graph_5617.html
You can see that the first daily graph has several drop-outs around
high bandwidth periods, and that the total data transferred in the
last 24 hours is under-reported in the first daily graphs.
I will not go through and replace every bandwidth graph with new
ones, only those of customers who are seen to be transferring more
than ~4.2GB in 5 minutes. So if you see a new graph appearing, this
is why.
Measuring 32-bit counters on a 2x 1 gigabit interface was of course
a very silly oversight, and it is now apparent that even the virtual
network device in an individual VPS has no problem exceeding
~114Mbit/s.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
By now you should have all received notification of the scheduled
maintenance that will be taking place in the early hours of the
morning (UK time) on 2016-09-02, 03 and 05.
This is the result of an embargoed security update that we have been
made aware of today.
If you have not seen the notification which was sent directly to the
email address we have for you at:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/contacts/
please first check your spam folders, etc., and failing that please
do let us know.
Also if you have any questions I am happy to answer these either on
the users mailing list or directly in a private ticket at
support(a)bitfolk.com.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
