30 Nov
2016
30 Nov
'16
6 a.m.
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
4 Dec
4 Dec
4:31 a.m.
New subject: [bitfolk] Upcoming reboots for security fixes prior to 13 December
Hi,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 06:00:35AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
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.
An email has now gone out informing you of the 90 minute (not 2
hour) window in which the work will take place for each of your
VPSes. If you haven't received it, please do check your spam folders
and whitelist where appropriate.
As mentioned in the email it is now possible for you to indicate
that you would like your VPS to be suspended and restored instead of
shut down and booted again. You can do that from:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/config/#prefs
It is not the default because depending on your kernel and
applications, it sometimes doesn't work. You can read more about it
here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore
If you indicate that you would like suspend/restore to be attempted
then we will add Nagios ping checks for your VPS, as most of the
time a failure to restore will lead to your VPS being unpingable. A
failing Nagios ping check will cause us to notice while carrying out
the maintenance, and we'll then have a look at your console and
reboot your VPS where necessary.
There is still the possibility that some application you run will
not behave correctly, however, which is something only you can check
for.
If you have any questions please do let us know, either here or at
support(a)bitfolk.com.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
13 Dec
13 Dec
3:17 a.m.
New subject: [bitfolk] Upcoming reboots for security fixes prior to 13 December
Hi,
On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 06:00:35AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Rather disappointingly there's been another round
of security
advisories for Xen, some of which affect the configuration in use at
BitFolk:
The maintenance work to patch against this bug (XSA-200) has now
been completed, without incident. During the embargo for XSA-200
more security bugs were found so fixes for these were deployed also.
As per:
http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/
the embargo for XSA-200 ends in just under 9 hours, and the embargo
for the others ends at 2016-12-21 12:00Z.
Thanks for your patience during this work.
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.
In the end customers chose for 22 of their VPSes to be suspended and
restored and as far as I am aware¹ there was a 100% success rate in
this.
If you would like to enable suspend and restore for your VPS you can
do so from:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/config/#prefs
Cheers,
Andy
¹ We added Nagios ping checks for every one of these VPSes, if they
didn't exist already, and all of those checks failed then recovered
as expected. In the failure modes I have seen network connectivity
does not return.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
2709
days inactive
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days old
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Andy Smith