BitFolk Announcements September 2020

announce@mailman.bitfolk.com

1 participants
3 discussions

Reboots will be necessary to address security issues, probably early hours 19/20/21 September

by Andy Smith

Hello, Unfortunately some serious security bugs have been discovered in the Xen hypervisor and fixes for these have now been pre-disclosed, with an embargo that ends at 1200Z on 22 September 2020. As a result we will need to apply these fixes and reboot everything before that time. We are likely to do this in the early hours of the morning UK time, on 19, 20 and 21 September. In the next few days individual emails will be sent out confirming to you which hour long maintenance window your services are in. The times will be in UTC; please note that UK is currently observing daylight savings and as such is currently at UTC+1. We expect the work to take between 15 and 30 minutes per bare metal host. If you have opted in to suspend and restore¹ then your VM will be suspended to storage and restored again after the host it is on is rebooted. Otherwise your VM will be cleanly shut down and booted again later. If you cannot tolerate the downtime then please contact support(a)bitfolk.com. We may be able to almost-live migrate you to already-patched hardware before the regular maintenance starts. You can expect a few tens of seconds of pausing in that case. This is still a somewhat experimental process and also requires you to opt in to suspend and restore. Cheers, Andy ¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years, 7 months

Pushover notifications now available (beta)

by Andy Smith

Hi, I make use of Pushover myself: https://pushover.net/ A customer asked for non-email notifications from BitFolk's monitoring and I suggested Pushover for them too. I've now added the necessary bits to generalise it for any customer. If you would like Pushover notifications then please mail support(a)bitfolk.com to ask for them. When you ask please: - supply your Pushover User Key (visible in your Pushover dashboard) - state whether you want it for just host notifications (is the host down or unreachable?) or for service notifications as well (is service X on host Y in a non-OK state?). Services might generate quite a few notifications. If you only want SOME services to generate these notifications, you can let us know what those are too. Limitations: - Will only send a notification on a non-OK state, so you won't receive RECOVERY/OK notifications. This is in the interest of not deluging you with notifications. - Priority is always set to 1 (high), which means it will try to make a noise and vibrate your mobile device. You can override that in your mobile device. The full API does allow an emergency priority which would require you to acknowledge it, and three quieter options, but I'm not ready to support any of those yet. - You can't currently have Pushover notifications without email notifications too. - You can't tell monitoring to stop sending you Pushover notifications but carry on sending email ones. Anything you'd usually do to stop notifications will stop both kinds. If more than a few people request this then I will integrate it with the address book in the panel so you can get Pushover notifications by adding a contact with a Pushover key there. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years, 7 months

BitFolk's bank details changed (but the old ones will still work)

by Andy Smith

Hi, If you don't pay us by bank transfer or standing order then you can ignore this email. BitFolk's bank details have changed. The old ones should still work but next time it is convenient it would be good if you would update to the new ones. The new bank details are listed on every invoice generated after 1600Z today, and also in your Panel at: https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/invoices/#toc-bank-details Despite Barclays assuring me that I would still be able to log in and download a final statement after the old account was closed, it appears I cannot do that so I'm unable to see any bank payments made in the last couple of days. I expect I'll get a final paper copy of the statement through the post in the next week and will be able to mark those payments as settled then. So if you made a bank payment in the last few days but the invoice is still marked as outstanding, do not worry. Get in touch if you start to receive late payment reminders about it. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years, 7 months

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BitFolk Announcements September 2020