BitFolk Announcements

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265 discussions

2014-11-26 ~1432Z: Problem with kwak.bitfolk.com, and IPv6 (all hosts)

by Andy Smith

Hi, Around 1432Z IPv6 connectivity to all hosts was lost, and VPSes on kwak.bitfolk.com became unreachable (both IPv4 and v6). Subsequent investigation has revealed that kwak.bitfolk.com was unexpectedly power cycled and returned in a configuration that had no networking. IPv6 connectivity was restored at around 1503Z and VPSes hosted on kwak.bitfolk.com are now in the process of being booted again. If you are unable to reach your VPS, and it is hosted on kwak.bitfolk.com¹, please log in to your Xen Shell and look at its console to see what is happening: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Xen_Shell There is a high possibility that the VPS is still booting, is performing a filesystem check, or has failed to boot because of some configuration problem local to your VPS. If you have ruled all of those out then please do send a support ticket to support(a)bitfolk.com. For those of you with Nagios monitoring set up I will be watching to make sure any alerts recover where that is within my power. To follow: - How kwak came to be power cycled - Why it didn't boot with networking enabled - Why IPv6 broke for everyone even though it should have failed over to another router. Cheers, Andy ¹ If you don't know, you can find out which piece of hardware your VPS is hosted on as follows: https://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_3_Which_piece_of_actual_h… -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. — John Levine

9 years, 11 months

Free LWN subs will be discontinued from 28th November

by Andy Smith

Hi, You may be aware of the "free LWN for a year" offer: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Free_LWN_subscriptions The current set of subscriptions are up for renewal on 28th November and I don't intend to renew them. Therefore those of you currently using them are going to need to pay for an account if you wish to continue using LWN as a subscriber after that point. The reason for this is that for the last couple of years it's actually been quite hard to give these away to new customers, and it's not something I want to just keep giving away to the same people. I think something like an electronic subscription to Linux Voice may be more desirable, and that's something I'm willing to explore if they implement an institution subscription system. That is an idea I've heard them mention in passing but I'm not sure it will ever happen as although I think it might be a better fit for BitFolk customers, it's hard to imagine it being that popular amongst institutions. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 1 month

puppetlabs and torproject APT repositories added to apt-cacher

by Andy Smith

Hello, By request, apt.puppetlabs.com and deb.torproject.org have been added to the apt-cacher: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Apt-cacher So if you make use of either of these repositories you can now do so through that if you wish. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 6 months

semi-emergency reboot of urquell will take place at 2014-05-09 0100Z

by Andy Smith

Hi, Due to what I believe is a software bug in the version of Xen hypervisor running on urquell.bitfolk.com, it has become impossible to boot some VPSes. This will require a reboot to recover from, so I intend to perform a clean shut down and boot again at 0100Z Friday 9th May (2am tonight UK time). This is necessary in order to regain manageability. At the same time I will apply updates that should fix the problem. Customers on urquell should expect to see a clean shutdown followed by a boot again. I should expect the outage to take no more than 30 minutes. Apologies for the disruption and short notice this has entailed. urquell currently has an uptime of 1166 days. If you are unsure which piece of hardware your VPS currently resides on, you can work it out in a number of ways. Please see: https://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_3_Which_piece_of_actual_h… http://is.gd/16wUTV Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 6 months

Ubuntu 14.04.x LTS (Trusty Tahr) available for self-install

by Andy Smith

Hi, Last night I added Ubuntu 14.04.x LTS (Trusty Tahr) to the self-installer. It appears to work fine in my limited tests. If you intend to make use of it just do a self-install by the usual procedure: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer I am not yet aware of any customers who have upgraded to 14.04 though so while I do not expect any issues, you may want to exercise some caution. Upgrades from the previous LTS (12.04.x LTS) are of course supported by Ubuntu and I know of no reason why that also would not work, but again I am not yet aware of any customer who has done one. Installers for: 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) were removed as these distributions are now EOL for security updates. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 6 months

Nagios NRPE remote command execution vulnerability

by Andy Smith

Hi, I've seen a bunch of scans for this exploit across my hosts, and have already heard of some hosts compromised by it: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Apr/240 So if you run Nagios NRPE, please make sure to: - Firewall it off appropriately - Use its config options for restricting who can talk to it - Disable client specification of command arguments if possible - Upgrade to a fixed version Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 7 months

OpenSSL "heartbleed" vulnerability

by Andy Smith

Hello, If you've been reading tech news in the last 24 hours then you're probably aware of "heartbleed", but if not then you will want to have a read of: http://heartbleed.com/ and take appropriate action. If you trust this site you can use it to check if your HTTPS server is vulnerable or not: http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 7 months

Would non-UK customers like to be able to pay by SEPA Direct Debit?

by Andy Smith

Hi, As you may know, we have supported UK Direct Debit payments for quite some time: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Direct_Debit It works well. At the moment it's only available to customers with a UK bank account though. GoCardless are trialling their SEPA Direct Debits platform at the moment, which would allow customers in countries that use the Euro to also use the same Direct Debit payment method. In order to judge whether this is a priority to work on I would be most grateful if anyone who would be interested in switching to this payment method would: 1. Visit: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/123 2. Log in to it (usual BitFolk account credentials) 3. Vote it up. Thanks! Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting "I'd be happy to buy all variations of sex to ensure I got what I wanted." — Gary Coates (talking about cabling)

10 years, 8 months

Communicado's email activity

by Andy Smith

Hello, Here's some information that those of you using your VPSes to handle email may be interested in: https://github.com/antibodyMX/communicado If you're not interested in receiving such emails from Communicado then the information there should help you, and please do consider contributing to the effort if you're able. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 10 months

Administrative NTP queries must be restricted

by Andy Smith

Hi, As you may be aware, massive distributed denial of service attacks have been mounted over the last couple of weeks by sending forged administrative queries to public NTP servers. A favourite query in use is "monlist", which results in a constant stream of data being returned from the NTP server to the victim host. While we have no evidence that any BitFolk VPS has so far been used in such an attack, we are going to take some pre-emptive action to minimise the risk. As there is no need to allow these administrative queries from the entire Internet, we now require these to be disabled by default and only allowed from specified trusted hosts. This has always been the configuration provided to you on provisioning of your VPS, so only those who have changed their ntpd configuration would have re-enabled administrative queries. Disabling administrative queries is normally achieved by using the "noquery" option in the "restrict" lines. This setting does not disallow time synchronisation. For more information please see: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Securing_NTP Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

10 years, 10 months

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