Hi,
A couple of hours ago the server kwak.bitfolk.com stopped being able
to start new VPSes or do networking to itself and an emergency
reboot is required, which is happening now. Apologies for the
disruption.
More detail to follow.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
[originally just to Andy but I thought it might be of general interest]
Hi Andy,
I am thinking of upgrading my VPS to Lenny and was wondering what you
think the easiest, or least downtime, option would be.
I suppose either;
0) Do a dist-upgrade - is this liable to work like a charm?
1) Back-up the server and get you to put a fresh Lenny image up that I
then go and configure as I want.
2) Take a fresh Lenny image off your hands, configure it and send it
back to you to replace the current Etch image.
3) Create my own Lenny image and send it to you.
I have not administered a Xen host before so I was wondering what your
recommendation would be?
I'm quite happy to play with Xen, that's not an issue.
I'm really wondering whether there are any bitfolk-specific things that
you've done to the images that mean taking one off your hands and
configuring it would be more useful than sending you my own that I build
from a default Lenny install?
Regards,
Nigel
Hi folks,
Some maintenance work is required to ensure that all BitFolk servers
are as power efficient as possible. This includes:
- Fitting 80plus certified high efficiency PSUs
- Making sure that server fans have speed control
- Making sure that various power management features are enabled in
the BIOS
- Re-metering servers that have already had work done
All of this requires the hardware to be switched off.
I am currently arranging a time to do this with BitFolk's colo
provider (who have to be present as it's them who need to take new
measurements). It will almost certainly be near the start of the
week commencing Monday 20th July, starting after 7pm on the chosen
evening. I'm letting you know now in order to give you as much
notice as possible, and will later confirm the exact date.
I will be shutting down every server in turn and hopefully keeping
them off for no more than about 30 minutes each. I'm not intending
to do suspend/restore, so therefore you can expect a clean shut down
and then boot up again around 30 minutes later.
I won't be able to give you an exact time of when I will do the work
on each server, so it will just be one outage some time that
evening. I will update http://twitter.com/bitfolk with my progress
giving as much warning as I can (minutes) of each server being shut
down.
If anyone has any major and non-movable event planned for this time
then I can probably reschedule this work, as long as you let me know
as soon as possible please. It does have to happen some time before
26th July, however.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
"I remember the first time I made love. Perhaps it was not love exactly but I
made it and it still works." -- The League Against Tedium
Hi,
If you don't rely on BitFolk to provide secondary DNS servers for
you then you can ignore the rest of this email.
For a little while now there have been some intermittent issues with
the nameserver.net secondary DNS servers (sou.nameserver.net,
phl.nameserver.net, sjc.nameserver.net). As you may know, these are
provided by a third party and I have no direct access to them, which
means that I have had to rely on others to resolve these problems.
It's become clear that it's no longer appropriate or sensible for
BitFolk to freeload the nameserver.net service, so I am deprecating
use of the nameserver.net servers.
I have added one more BitFolk DNS server on a Slicehost virtual
server in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. BitFolk has had it for over a
year, I use it for various other things and am happy with the
stability.
I will be adding one or two more when I have the opportunity.
Probably one in continental Europe and another somewhere else.
In looking at adding new servers I also came to the conclusion that
the "ns$x.$location.bitfolk.com" naming scheme wasn't a good idea
since it creates the expectation that a server actually is in
$location. Servers do move over time through replacement or just
having a better deal elsewhere, and changing nameserver names in
zone files and registries can't happen regularly.
Therefore I have decided to switch to:
a.authns.bitfolk.comb.authns.bitfolk.comc.authns.bitfolk.com
I may later add a d.authns.bitfolk.com but after that I will instead
focus on growing each of the four clusters. Therefore this set of
server/cluster names should be stable; you will have to trust that
they are sufficiently widespread.
I won't be removing any of the zones that are currently using the
nameserver.net servers, I just won't be adding new ones to them. If
your zones have nameserver.net servers in them then you may like to
update them as described here:
http://bitfolk.com/secondary_dns.html
but they shouldn't stop working so there isn't any great rush. The
same goes for the old ns0.lon / ns0.sfo nameserver names; these will
continue to work so there isn't any requirement to update your
existing zone files. If you do make changes then don't forget to
update your registrar records as well.
When you ask for a domain to be added to the BitFolk secondaries,
a.authns.bitfolk.com slaves it from you. As soon as you add
a.authns.bitfolk.com to your list of nameservers then all other
BitFolk DNS servers will grab a copy from each other. You can use
as many or as few of the servers as you wish but all zones will be
added to all servers.
I have monitoring in place against your master server and on all of
the BitFolk servers to check that the domains are being served. I
will later add checks that they all agree on the serial number too.
If you have any further questions feel free to ask here or off-list.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
> The optimum programming team size is 1.
Has Jurassic Park taught us nothing?
-- pfilandr
Serving the IP of the host best able to serve your user does not sound
like a fringe requirement to me. :)
I have http://static.natalian.org/ mirrored at 67.205.53.240
(California) and 88.198.3.35 (Germany). It's just my personal pictures
and videos. Unsurprisingly video playback [1] from California is a
poor user experience from the UK. Germany is better. So I am looking
for a free personal (low requests) GEO DNS service that serves the IP
of the server closest to my user.
It sounds like a bit of a failing to me of DNS not to be able to
supply this feature via TTL or some clever routing tables. Do I
_really_ need to host my own DNS with a Maxmind hack?
Kind regards,
[1] http://natalian.org/archives/2009/06/30/HTML5_video_porn/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andy Smith via RT <support(a)rt.bitfolk.com>
Date: 2009/7/1
Subject: Re: [bitfolk.com #1624] DNS service
To: hendry(a)webconverger.com
Hi Kai,
On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 01:06:31PM +0000, Kai Hendry via RT wrote:
> 2009/7/1 Andy Smith via RT <support(a)rt.bitfolk.com>:
> > In general that won't work. That is, it will be largely random.
>
> Hmm, I thought DNS had some magic way to resolve to the nearest DNS
> server with TTL or something.
When a client's resolver asks for the list of NS servers for the
domain, the list will be returned then it will pick one at random.
Geographic DNS load balancing in general works by having a more
complicated DNS server work out which of its possible answers is
most likely to be closest to the IP of the resolver that is asking.
Most third party DNS services (including BitFolk's) won't support
this because it's a rather fringe requirement.
> So I need some sort GEO DNS service? Can you recommend one?
> http://serverfault.com/questions/30567/geo-dns-providers
I'm afraid I can't because I haven't needed one for a long time.
Many years ago when I used to run an IRC network with a need for
this, we developed a module for PowerDNS which would do this based
on MaxMind's free database of IP network -> geographic location.
The primary developer of this, Mark Bergsa, went on to work for the
Wikimedia Foundation and I believe that Wikipedia now use this
solution. So maybe that would be worth looking into.
It's a good question for the users mailing list.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
"What should one say after making love? ``Thank you'' seems too much.
``I'm sorry'' - somehow not enough." -- The League Against Tedium
