BitFolk Announcements

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259 discussions

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, 9 months

2021-07-19 ~19:30Z - ~20:45Z: Emergency reboot of server "limoncello"

by Andy Smith

Hi, At about 19:30Z we started receiving alerts for customer services on server "limoncello". On investigation it quickly became apparent that this was the intermittent "I/O stall" problem we've been seeing on all servers and have been grappling with for months now. All I could do was power cycle the server. My current line of investigation is to upgrade both the hypervisor and the kernel when this happens, and so far it hasn't reoccurred on any of the servers where that has been done, though the sometimes months long gap between incidents means it's not possible to be sure. Although this last happened 16 days ago, that was on a different server ("jack"). With the upgrades done the server was rebooted again and at about 20:28Z customer VMs started booting again. This was complete by about 20:45Z. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 10 months

2021-07-03 ~05:23Z - ~06:08Z: Emergency reboot of server "jack"

by Andy Smith

Hi, At about 05:23Z we started receiving alerts for customer services on server "jack". There had been some alerts for about 40 minutes before that, but they weren't serious enough to send push notifications, only emails. On investigation it quickly became apparent that this was the intermittent "I/O stall" problem we've been seeing on all servers and have been grappling with for months now. All I could do was power cycle the server, which happened at about 05:30Z. My current line of investigation is to upgrade both the hypervisor and the kernel when this happens, and so far it hasn't reoccurred on any of the servers where that has been done, though the sometimes months long gap between incidents means it's not possible to be sure. With the upgrades done, the server was rebooted again and at about 05:54Z customer VMs started booting again. This was complete by about 06:08Z. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 10 months

2021-06-19 ~20:37Z - 2021-06-19 ~21:3Z: Emergency reboot of server "hobgoblin"

by Andy Smith

Hi, At about 20:37Z we started receiving alerts for customer services on server "hobgoblin". It quickly became apparent that this was the intermittent "I/O stall" problem we've been seeing on all servers and have been grappling with for months now. All I could do was power cycle the server, which happened at about 20:58Z. We're still not able to reproduce the problem on demand and it can be several months between incidents. We've tried upgrading hypervisor and that's not helped. It's looking more like a problem in the Linux kernel. So, I upgraded that as well to a newer self-made package. I've been communicating with a couple of the linux-raid devs and we have some ideas but gathering information and making changes is going slowly because of the lack of reproducibility and long time between incidents. It's basically a case of making a single change any time there is an issue. With the upgrades done, the server was rebooted again and at about 21:19Z customer VMs started booting again. This was complete by about 21:33Z. Obviously I am not happy with these outages and I'm doing everything I can to find the root cause. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 11 months

2021-06-09 ~23:33Z - 2021-06-10 ~00:16Z: Emergency reboot of server "clockwork"

by Andy Smith

Hi, At around 00:33 BST (23:33Z) we started to receive alerts regarding services on host "clockwork". Upon investigation it was showing all the signs of being the intermittent "frozen I/O" problem we've been having: https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20210425.071102.9d9a1cc5.en.html As mentioned in that earlier email, I'd decided that the next step would be prepare new hypervisor packages and I did do that the next day. As this issue seems to happen only every few months and on different servers we do not yet know if the new packages fix the problem. They've been in use on other servers since late April without incident, but that isn't yet proof enough given the long periods between occurrences. Anyway, after "clockwork" was power cycled the new packages were installed there and then all VMs were started again. This was completed by about 01:16 BST (00:16Z). There are still many of our servers where we know this is going to happen again at some point. I don't feel comfortable scheduling maintenance to upgrade them when I don't know if the upgrade will be effective. If we can go a significant period of time on the newer version without incident then we will schedule a maintenance window to get the remaining servers on those versions too. It is also possible that there will be a security patch that forces a maintenance, in which case we'll upgrade the hypervisor packages to the newer version at the same time. There are also some servers still left to be emptied so that their operating systems can be upgraded. Those are "hen" and "paradox". Once they are emptied and upgraded they will of course be put on the newer version of the hypervisor. It is expected that customer services we move from these servers will be put on servers that already have the newer hypervisor version. Thank you for your patience and I apologise for the disruption. I'm doing all that I can to try to find a solution. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 11 months

Reminder: there will be scheduled maintenance on 2021-05-27 affecting customers on four servers

by Andy Smith

Hi, This is your one week to go reminder that there will be scheduled maintenance on four servers starting at 23:00 BST (22:00Z) on Thursday 27 May 2021. The four servers affected will be: - elephant.bitfolk.com - limoncello.bitfolk.com - snaps.bitfolk.com - talisker.bitfolk.com The maintenance window is 3 hours long but we expect the work to take less than 30 minutes per server. A direct email has also been sent out to contacts for all customers on those servers. If you cannot tolerate the ~30 minutes of downtime at that time please reply to the email to open a support ticket asking for your service to be moved about. That will take place at a time of your choosing in the next week, but please ask early if you need it. There are further details here: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Maintenance/2021-05-Re-racking Please note that we are still moving customers around due to rolling software upgrades on our servers. That is unrelated to this work, but right now customers are being moved off of snaps.bitfolk.com. Possibly that server will be emptied before this work takes place. The above wiki page tells you how to work out which server your service is on. Any other questions, please do let us know! Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

2 years, 11 months

2021-05-15 ~21:00 BST (20:00Z) onwards forced reboot of host "jack"

by Andy Smith

Hi, Tonight from around 21:00 BST onwards we started getting alerts and support tickets regarding customer services on host jack.bitfolk.com. I had a look and unfortunately it appears to be a re-occurrence of previous issues regarding stalled IO: https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20210425.071102.9d9a1cc5.en.html https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20210220.032844.00dc9600.en.html https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20201116.003514.25278824.en.html Things were largely unresponsive so I had to forcibly reboot the server. Customer services were all booted or in the process of booting by about 21:53. What we know so far: - It must be a software issue, not a hardware issue, as it's happened on multiple servers of different specifications. - It's only happening with servers that we've upgraded to Xen version 4.12.x. - It's going to be really difficult to track down because there can be months between occurrences. Each time this has occurred I've made some change that I'd hoped would lead to a solution, but I've now tried all the easy things and so all that remains is to do another software upgrade. I think we're going to have to build some packages for Xen 4.14 and install that on a test host and see how it goes. The difficulty is that once I do that and it seems to work, we'll never really know because it could just be in the long period of time where the problem is not triggered. Clearly once we have seemingly-working packages we can't leave them spinning for 6 months just to reassure ourselves of that. I also am unsure about whether it is a good idea to force additional downtimes on you in order to upgrade servers to 4.14.x when I don't even know yet if that will fix the issue. What I can do is have the upgrade ready and then if/when the issue re-occurs do the upgrade then, so it boots into that. Anyway, all I can say is that this is a really unfortunate state of affairs that obviously I'm not happy with and I'm doing all that I can to resolve it. These outages are unacceptable and rest assured they are aggravating me more than anyone else. Thanks, Andy Smith BitFolk Ltd -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years

Problems with host "jack"

by Andy Smith

Hi, I'm sorry. There are problems with the host and VMs on jack will be unresponsive or shutting down. I'm working on it. Cheers, Andy

3 years

2021-05-15 ~17:28 BST (16:28Z) - Unscheduled power cycle of server "macallan"

by Andy Smith

Hi, At approximately 17:28 BST we started receiving numerous alerts for server "macallan" and customer services on it. Upon investigation I was unable to connect to the IPMI console of the server. I got in contact with the colo provider who quickly realised that they were doing work in that rack and had knocked out the power cable for this server. The server started booting around 17:35 and all customer VMs had booted by 17:47. We use locking power cables in our servers to try to minimise this sort of thing, but they only lock at one end - the server end. The server's power cord had come loose at the other end. "macallan" is one of our older servers which is single power supply unit. To mitigate that risk it plugs into a automatic transfer switch so that its single PSU continues to receive power even if one of the rack's two PDUs or power feeds fails. Unfortunately that does not protect it against its single power cord coming out of the ATS. We have started a hardware refresh and the new spec servers do have dual PSUs which should help to avoid things like this in future. Please accept my apologies for this disruption. Andy Smith BitFolk Ltd -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years

21 critical Exim security issues need addressing

by Andy Smith

Hi, TL;DR: There's 21 serious security vulnerabilities recently published for the Exim mail server, 10 of which are remotely triggerable. Anyone running Exim needs to patch it ASAP or risk having their server automatically root compromised as soon as an exploit is cooked up. Which may have happened already. Details: https://lwn.net/Articles/855282/ We don't usually post about other vendors' security issues on the announce@ list but I'm making an exception for this one because Exim is installed by default on all versions of Debian, and more than 60% of BitFolk customers use some version of Debian. If you're running Exim you need to upgrade it immediately. Package updates have already been posted for Debian 9 and 10 (stretch/oldstable and buster/stable). The last time this sort of thing happened with Exim several customers were automatically compromised. As it's a root level compromise, if it happens to you then you will never be sure what exactly what done to your server. You might end up needing to reinstall it. Most hosts, unless they are acting as a server listed in one or more domains' MX records, do not need to be remotely accessible on port 25. If that's the case for you then you would be well advised to reconfigure Exim to only listen on localhost. Though there are still 11 other vulnerabilities that local users could exploit. At least you'd only get rooted by a friend, right? An exploit hasn't been published yet but that doesn't mean that one doesn't exist, and now that the source changes are public it should be fairly easy for developers to work out how to do it. Some of the bugs go back to 2004 so basically every Exim install is at risk. If you are running a release of Debian prior to version 9 (stretch) then it's out of security support and may not ever see an updated package for this, so you need to strongly consider turning off any Exim server and doing an OS upgrade before you turn it back on. If you need help, you could reply to this and seek help from other customers, or BitFolk can help you as a consultancy service, but you probably don't want to pay consultancy prices and in any moderately complicated setup our approach is going to be an OS upgrade anyway. Email support(a)bitfolk.com to discuss if still interested in that. Best of luck with the upgrading! Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

3 years

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