BitFolk Announcements August 2021

announce@mailman.bitfolk.com

1 participants
2 discussions

Reboots will be necessary to address security issues, probably early hours 24+25 August 2021

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 25 August 2021. 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 Tuesday 24 and Wednesday 25 August. 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 45 minutes per bare metal host. We are going to take the opportunity to complete upgrading the kernel and hypervisor on some of the hosts that haven't had that done yet, which is why the work may take a few minutes more for some hosts. There are two hosts left that we are trying to migrate customers off of ("hen" and "paradox"). That was supposed to be done by now but that effort has been hampered by the other issues we've been having and is dragging on. We don't intend to patch or reboot those two hosts, instead mitigating issues with configuration and renewing efforts to clear customers off of them. If you are concerned about that we will be happy to move your service as a priority. 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 will be able to migrate² you to already-patched hardware before the regular maintenance starts, at a time of your choosing. You can expect a few tens of seconds of pausing in that case. This process uses suspend&restore so has the same caveats. Thanks, Andy ¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore ² https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore#Migration -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 8 months

Debian 11 (bullseye) now supported for self-install and new orders

by Andy Smith

Hi, The new stable release of Debian, bullseye, was released over the weekend: https://bits.debian.org/2021/08/bullseye-released.html This is now supported for self-install: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer#Debian by doing "install debian_bullseye", and also of course as a new order. If upgrading in-place from buster to bullseye please make sure to read the release notes as there are a few things to be aware of: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.… There aren't any known BitFolk-specific issues with bullseye, though we do suggest that if you're running buster or beyond that you do so in PVH mode: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/PVH I *think* it is still possible to install the new testing release (bookworm) by doing "install debian_testing" but we have to check that and fix it if necessary, which will happen later this week. If you're desperate to do a clean install of Debian testing and you find that "install debian_testing" doesn't work then I recommend installing bullseye and doing an in-place upgrade from there (will be almost identical right now). Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 8 months

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BitFolk Announcements August 2021