Hi,
As previously discussed on the users list:
https://is.gd/wvBvEn
…everyone's booting method has now been changed to pvgrub2.
The short summary is that it will look and behave more like GRUB now
(because it *is* GRUB), and you can expect a typical GRUB2
configuration in /boot/grub/grub.cfg (/boot/grub2/grub.cfg on CentOS
7.x) to work now.
More details at:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Booting
If you think you may have reinstalled your VPS using the rescue VM
and changed its architecture in the process, it is important that
you check that we know the correct architecture. You can see what we
think your architecture is by:
- Typing "arch" in the Xen Shell.
- Looking at https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/ where it is listed
next to what we think your operating system is.
If your architecture is set incorrectly then your VPS will not boot.
If the bootloader appears to detect the correct configuration file
and kernel file but still says it can't load it, then check the
architecture first.
As far as I am aware the only way you could have got a VPS with a
different architecture to what we think you have is if you installed
it manually through the rescue VM. The supported installers only
install the matching architecture.
If you checked that and it's correct but your VPS still does not
boot, do not panic. Contact support and we can revert you to pygrub
until we figure out what is wrong. But having tested many
configurations of VPS now, the only failures encountered so far have
been trying to boot a 64-bit kernel with an i686 bootloader or vice
versa.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hello,
In late 2015 / early 2016 when we started switching to all-SSD
storage, some customers expressed a wish for cheaper but less
performant archive storage.
This is now available for purchase in blocks of 50GiB at £0.40+VAT
per month, £1.10+VAT per quarter or £4.00+VAT per year. It's
therefore one tenth the price of regular SSD storage.
If you'd like to purchase some then please send an email to
support(a)bitfolk.com. At the moment we would need to move your VPS to
different servers to give you access to archive storage, but that
tends to only take a couple of minutes.
Here's some more information on this:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Archive_storage
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
— John Levine
Hello,
What will become Debian stretch (9.x) is going to be frozen on
5 February:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStretch
and presumably released relatively soon after that, so we've added
stretch to our self-installer.
If you are keen on testing a new install of it you should now be
able to use that. Bear in mind it still is Debian "testing" though,
not a release yet, so there may be issues you will need to report to
Debian.
More info on the self-installer:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
From around 02:50 for about 1 hour there was an outage of the
authoritative DNS service on a.authns.bitfolk.co.uk. Those of you
making use of the service probably could not fail to notice as you
will have received PROBLEM and then RECOVERY alerts about it for
each domain.
This was simply due to me making a mistake in a firewall rule. :( It
was a bit more complicated than that as it didn't take effect until
hours after some other change I made and even while seeing the
alerts myself it took me some time to work out exactly what had
happened.
Auth. DNS service was still working on {b,c}.authns.bitfolk.com so
this shouldn't have had too bad an effect on actual service.
Somewhat ironically, this happened due to work I was doing to
isolate a.authns to make it safer to make changes! Once that is
completed it should be harder to break it in this fashion.
Apologies for the disruption,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
No doubt because of the surge in price of Bitcoin recently, I've had
a few queries about how to pay more than the value of an existing
outstanding invoice by Bitcoin.
With more usual payment methods like PayPal or bank transfers it is
simple to just send us an arbitrary amount of money. If you have
outstanding invoices then they get paid, and any left over goes to
account credit.
The same is not true of Bitcoins because at the moment we can't hold
account credit in Bitcoins. It would be technically possible of
course, but I do not want BitFolk to be an entity that holds funds
in Bitcoins, for a variety of security and regulatory reasons. That
means that we can only process Bitcoins by immediately turning them
into British Pounds (GBP).
Our Bitcoin payment system presents a payment request for the exact
Bitcoin equivalent that we're prepared to accept at that point in
time. We do not recommend manually editing the payment request in
order to pay more as the chance of a typo causing you to send it all
to the wrong address is high.
If you do want to pre-pay an amount in Bitcoins though, all is not
lost. Please contact support stating roughly how much you'd like to
pay. We'll create an invoice (in GBP) that roughly matches that
amount. When you pay it the GBP sum will go on your account as
credit.
This may be useful if you have some Bitcoins burning a hole in your
virtual wallet and want an easy way to cash out, since many virtual
currency marketplaces want lots of personal information about you,
and/or are risky.
This pre-payment issue was actually considered already and put in
the Bitcoin payments FAQ¹ almost 3 years ago, but I am not surprised
that it is not known about.
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Bitcoin#Can_I_preload_my_BitFolk_account_usi…
(or https://is.gd/7Z5JXv)
Please note that:
1) There is going to be a limit to the acceptable amount of such a
transaction, as our Bitcoin payment processor would still be left
holding that amount of Bitcoins and exposing themselves to risk.
A very large transaction would also bring Know Your Customer /
Anti-Money Laundering concerns. In the context of how much
BitFolk's services cost I wouldn't expect that to be an issue and
we will deal with it on a case by case basis.
2) These prepayments will not be refundable. We are not a virtual
currency exchange. You would be buying a voucher for use of
BitFolk's services. So no paying hundreds of GBP worth of Bitcoin
and then immediately asking for it back as GBP. :)
Cheers,
Andy
¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Bitcoin#Can_I_preload_my_BitFolk_account_usi…
or https://is.gd/7Z5JXv
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hello,
The documentation for BitFolk's backups service was really in need
of an update so I rewrote it and moved it to the wiki here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups
If you use other services to backup your VPS then please feel free
to add them to the section at the end:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups#Alternative_backup_strategies
If you do something more than "just use Foo service" to backup your
VPS and feel like writing up a separate article then linking to it
from there would also be welcome.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
A bunch of alerts were just sent out regarding backup3.bitfolk.com.
I am doing some work on this host and forgot to disable alerts.
There is no need for concern. Apologies for the confusion.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
There was a consultation earlier regarding what to do about
customers who do not react to the alerts we send about serious
security issues we have found during regular scans of our IP space:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20161215.152008.2ee18732.en.html
Dealing with that was becoming quite a time sink and I was also
getting concerned about potentially inconsistent handling of these
issues when not working to any kind of documented process.
The consensus seemed to prefer the idea of network suspension after
21 days, so this has now been documented along with a bit more
information about the things we (or partners) scan for:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Vulnerability_scanning
This will now allow for some more automation.
I've also updated the Terms and Conditions page:
https://bitfolk.com/policy/terms.html
with a new paragraph that points to that page:
BitFolk and its partners regularly scan BitFolk's IP space for
well-known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, some of which
are serious enough that BitFolk will insist that The Customer
fixes them within a reasonable timescale.
Although the paragraph above that one is the usual blanket "reserve
the right to suspend service", so perhaps technically not necessary
to list particular things, it does however seem like useful info to
have there.
Normally we try to have changes to T's&C's not take effect for 30 days but I
don't see this as a change, since we have always used the "reserve
the right to suspend service" clause if necessary with things like
this. So if it is unfortunately necessary to suspend someone's
network we won't be waiting until 30+21 days to do it. And happily
there currently isn't anyone who's been receiving alerts for
anything like that long.
If you have any questions or feel the article (or process) could be
improved please let us know.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
"The electric guitar - like making love - is much improved by a little
feedback, completely ruined by too much." — The League Against Tedium
Hi,
If you don't use BitFolk's backup service then you can ignore the
rest of this email.
For a very long time we have allowed customer backups to go past the
quota and still continue working, arranging at a later time to fix
that situation (by the customer asking for some backed up data to be
deleted or else ordering more storage for backups).
This is now changing so that backups will stop happening once the
quota is exceeded.
Nagios alerts have always been sent out as WARNING at 95% of quota
and CRITICAL at 99% of quota. There is also a Nagios check for age
of backups and that will start to fire when there has been no
successful backup for a certain amount of time¹. Those whose backups
get suspended for being over quota will start to receive that one.
So, if you are currently receiving these alerts you do need to do
something about it.
Customers who are already over their backup quota at the moment have
already been contacted via support ticket, but in future we may
leave it down to you to get in touch.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ The time scales for those alerts depend on the backup schedule in
use. For those having a backup run every 4 hours (the default)
it's a WARNING after 10 hours and CRITICAL after 24 hours.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Rather disappointingly there's been another round of security
advisories for Xen, some of which affect the configuration in use at
BitFolk:
http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/
So unfortunately that means another round of "patch and reboot
everything" for us.
We will send out direct emails informing you of a two hour window in
which the work affecting your VPS is going to take place, but that
won't be sent for a week or so as testing of the patches will be
necessary first.
I am going to try to get a checkbox added to the panel website so
that those of you who are brave enough to try it can indicate that
you'd prefer for your VPS to be suspended and restored rather than
shutdown and booted.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
