BitFolk Announcements

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265 discussions

Ongoing "421 Misdirected Request" problem with Debian apt-cacher

by Andy Smith

Hi, It seems that since about 0500Z today the Debian mirror CDN at deb.debian.org has been rejecting requests from our apt-cacher with a message like: E: Failed to fetch http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullse… 421 Misdirected Request [IP: 2001:ba8:1f1:f079::2 80] I am looking into this. I don't know what is wrong yet. If you are urently needing to uodate or install new packages just disable use of BitFolk;s apt0cacher by removing "apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/" from every line of your sources.list file(s). I suspect some unfortunate interaction between Debian CDN (Fastly?) and apt-cacher, as other mirrors are still working fine through our apt-cacher. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

1 month

New /48 IPv6 assignments have been made for every customer - how to configure

by Andy Smith

Hi, If you do not use or care about IPv6 with regard to your BitFolk VM(s) you can stop reading this now. As of this month we have started assigning IPv6 /48 netblocks to new customers out of BitFolk's own allocation rather than continue giving out /64s from our colo provider's allocation. Yesterday evening we also assigned /48s to all existing customer VMs. New installs (including those done yourself) will get set up with your /48 from the start but existing VMs do need a few changes to make use of this new address apace. If you know what you are doing you can just look at: https://panel.bitfolk.com/dns/ to find your /48 assignment and start configuring addresses and routes from within that. They should work. If that doesn't work or if you need more guidance here is an article aimed at existing customers: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/New_/48_assignments,_October_2024 If you still have any questions not covered by the Troubleshooting or Frequently Asked Questions sections then please do ask, by reply email or support ticket or on Telegram or IRC. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

1 month, 3 weeks

Phishing emails

by Andy Smith

Hi, I do hope that none of you would be taken in by this sort of thing but just to warn you there have been a few phishing emails directed at various BitFolk addresses pretending to be from us, for example this one today which was directed at the "users" mailing list (and was caught by spam filters): https://ibb.co/MZh7p7K All emails that come from BitFolk should have SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you notice any that don't then please let us know. And of course, we wouldn't send out emails asking for passwords. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 months, 3 weeks

2024-05-23 ~20:25Z – ~20:50Z: Networking issue on host "jack"

by Andy Smith

Hi, Between about 20:25Z and ~20:50Z today host "Jack" lost all networking. All of the VMs on it became unreachable. It seems to have been some sort of kernel driver bug in the Ethernet module as it was "stuck" not passing traffic but the interface still showed as up. The hosts have bonded network interfaces to protect against switch failure, but as the interface stayed up this was not considered failed. Also they are in active-backup mode and the currently-active interface was the one that was stuck, so all traffic was trying to go that way. Networking was restored by setting the link down and up again. Traffic started to flow again, BGP sessions re-established and all was fine again. We could look into some sort of link keepalive method on the bonded interfaces as opposed to just relying on link state, but we have already decided to move away from bonded networking in favour of separate BGP sessions on each interface, That is how the next new servers will be deployed; they will not have network bonding. We have not yet tackled moving existing servers to this setup. If we had been in the situation without bonding I think we would have fared better here: there would have been a short blip while one BGP session went down, but the other would remain and we'd be left with some alerting and me scratching my head wondering why an interface that is up doesn't pass traffic. I will do some more investigation of this failure mode but in light of doing away with bonding being the direction we are already going, I don't think I want to alter how bonding is done on what will soon be a legacy setup. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 months, 4 weeks

Installer now available for Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat)

by Andy Smith

Hi, Self-install of Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) is now available from the Xen Shell. Thanks for your patience on this; I'm sorry it's taken so long. More info: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Xen_Shell It remains possible of course to upgrade in place from Ubuntu 22.04 with the "do-release-upgrade" command. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 months, 4 weeks

Please make sure you have patched your SSH against CVE-2024-6387

by Andy Smith

Hi, An unauthenticated remote root exploit has been discovered in SSH, including in versions shipped by Debian stable and newer, and most other up to date Linux distributions. https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-6387 Please make sure you have applied the necessary upgrades. If for some reason you are unable to apply an upgrade, the issue can be mitigated by setting LoginGraceTime to 0 in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. This will make it easier for people to tie up all connection slots, denying access to legitimate connections, but does avoid the remote root exploit. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

5 months, 3 weeks

The impending release of Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat)

by Andy Smith

Hi, As you may be aware, the next LTS release of Ubuntu is supposed to be ready in a couple of days. I've tested a do-release-upgrade from a basic 22.04 cloud image (what you get when you install 22.04 at BitFolk) and it seemed to go fine. As usual with this sort of thing though, all the complexity is in the packages you have installed, so that is no promise that it would be plain sailing for you. We will try to get a Xen Shell installer option added for 24.04 as soon after release as we can, but in the mean time just installing 22.04 and then typing "sudo do-release-upgrade -d" should get you there. I *think* it is the case that you need the "-d" as do-release-upgrade normally doesn't like doing it until the first point release. Thanks, Andy Ubuntu 24.04 LTS debtest1.vps.bitfolk.space hvc0 debtest1 login: ubuntu Password: Welcome to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-31-generic x86_64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com * Management: https://landscape.canonical.com * Support: https://ubuntu.com/pro System information as of Tue Apr 23 13:31:00 UTC 2024 System load: 0.07 Memory usage: 6% Processes: 131 Usage of /: 14.6% of 19.20GB Swap usage: 0% Users logged in: 0 Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled. 0 updates can be applied immediately. Enable ESM Apps to receive additional future security updates. See https://ubuntu.com/esm or run: sudo pro status ubuntu@debtest1:~$ uname -a Linux debtest1.vps.bitfolk.space 6.8.0-31-generic #31-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Apr 20 00:40:06 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

7 months, 4 weeks

Updated renewable energy statement for IP House

by Andy Smith

Hi, Since BitFolk moved datacentre from Telehouse to IP House, and since some customers had previously actually asked about a renewable energy statement, I've just updated it. TL;DR: it's 59% now and they aim for it to be 100% by February 2025. More detail: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Renewable_energy_statement Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 months

Network disruption today between about 2307 and 2314

by Andy Smith

Hi, Between approximately 23:07Z and 23:14Z today, due to an error in some work our colo provider was undertaking, two servers suffered a total network outage and our remaining servers a partial outage. Apologies for the disruption. It is not expected to re-occur. The two worst affected servers were "clockwork" and "macallan". Our servers have a pair of public network interfaces and are connected to two separate switches. The error took out one of the switches but left our ports enabled there, so it was a blackhole for such traffic. At the moment we use network bonding in active-backup mode. This didn't fail over because the link state didn't go down, so the two servers that had the misconfigured switch as their "active" interface experienced the longer outage. We are in the middle of transitioning away from a bonded setup and having separate interfaces do BGP with our colo provider and use BGP for such redundancy. We are already doing the BGP part but have yet to disable the bonding and split the interfaces back out. When that is complete — which I would hope to have done in a timescale of weeks, not months — this failure mode won't exist. Apologies again, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 months, 1 week

Datacentre move - advance notice of short expected outage in December or January

by Andy Smith

Dear customers, == TL;DR - Our colo provider is moving out of Telehouse to another datacentre close by, and we are going to be moving with them. - It will mean one short (2h or less) outage for each of your VMs as our servers are physically moved on multiple dates (to be decided) in December and January. - Nothing about your service will change. IPs, specs, prices will all remain the same. Our colo provider will retain the same transit providers and will still peer at LINX. == Background Since we started in 2006 BitFolk has been hosted with the same colo provider in the same datacentre: Telehouse London. Telehouse have decided to not renew our colo provider's contract with them and so they will be moving almost all of their infrastructure to another datacentre; the nearby IP House. https://www.ip-house.co.uk/ Given that we have much less than a single rack of infrastructure ourselves, our options here are to either move with our current colo provider or find another colo provider. Staying exactly where we are is not an available option. In light of the good relationship we have had with our colo provider since 2006, we have decided to move with them. This must take place before the middle of January 2024. == Planning At this early stage only broad decisions have been made. The main reason I'm writing at this time is to give you as much notice as possible of the relatively short outage you will experience in December or January. As soon as more detailed plans are made I will communicate them to you. As soon as the infrastructure is available at IP House we plan to move some of our servers there - ones with no customer services on them. We will schedule the physical movements of our servers that have customers VMs on them across multiple dates in December and January. As IP House is only about 500 metres from Telehouse, we don't expect an outage of more than about 2 hours for each server that is moved. If you can not tolerate an outage like that, please open a support ticket by emailing support(a)bitfolk.com as soon as possible. We will do our best to schedule a live migration of your service from hardware in Telehouse to hardware in IP House, resulting in only a few seconds of unreachability. You can contact us about that now, or you can wait until the exact date of your move is communicated to you, but there are a limited number of customers we can do this for. So please only ask for this if it's really important to you. If it is, please ask for it as soon as you can to avoid disappointment. == Answers To Anticipated Questions === Will anything about my service change? No. It will be on the same hardware, with the same IP addresses and same specification for the same price. We're aware that we're well overdue for a hardware refresh and we hope to be tackling that as soon as the move is done. That will result in a higher specification for the same price. === Will the network connectivity change? No. Our colo provider will retain the same mix of transit providers that it currently does, and it will still peer at LINX. === When exactly will outages affect me? We have not yet planned exactly when we will move our servers. As soon as we do we'll contact all affected customers. We need to co-ordinate work with our colo provider who are also busy planning the movement of all of their infrastructure and other customers, and installing new infrastructure at IP House. We expect there to be several dates with one or more servers moving on each date. All customers on those servers wil experience a short outage, but in total we would expect only the one outage per VM. === Will I be able to change the date/time of my outage? No. As the whole server that your VM is on will be moving at the specified time, your options will be to either go with that or seek to have your service live migrated ahead of that date. Please contact support if you want one or more of your VMs to be live migrated. If you have multiple VMs on different servers it is possible that they will be affected at the same time, i.e. if the two servers that your VMs are on are both to be relocated in the same maintenance window. If that is undesirable, again one or all of your VMs will need to be live migrated to servers already present in IP House. === What is live migration? It's where we snapshot your running VM and its storage, ship the data across to a new host and resume execution again. It typically results in only a few seconds of unreachability, and probably TCP connections still stay alive. More information: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore == Thanks Thanks for your custom. Despite the upheaval I am looking forward to a new chapter in a new datacentre! Andy Smith Director BitFolk Ltd -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

11 months, 1 week

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