Hello,
This weekend I'm off to OggCamp - http://oggcamp.org/
- if you're there too then do say hello! :)
Whilst there will be support cover and I should be available in
emergencies, this is also awkward timing because the next Ubuntu LTS
release is due for tomorrow.
Firstly I would say if you do have a support issue you need doing
before next week you should put it in now.
Secondly, if you are considering upgrading an Ubuntu VPS to 10.04 I
would recommend waiting until after the weekend. I haven't tried it
yet myself, though I do hope to do so. I think it should work, but
there might be some gotchas, and a lot of people breaking their
VPSes at once will stretch things this weekend. Plus if it does
break all I'll likely be able to do is put you back to 8.04 or
Debian.
Don't forget that I can snapshot your filesystem before you do a
major upgrade so if it all goes wrong we can roll it back to before
you started fairly easily. But you have to ask first.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
There's been a request for a read-only announcements list for
BitFolk, so I have decided to try this out.
I've created the "announce" list:
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
In future any sort of announcement that I would normally send to the
"users" list will instead be directed to "announce", and
automatically copied to the "users" list.
The "announce" list will not accept any discussion, and posts
sent through it will have Reply-To set to the "users" list.
Therefore if you're happy with the content and level of traffic on
the "users" list you need not do anything, as all announcements will
continue to end up there.
If on the other hand you would prefer to only see announcements from
BitFolk and not any user issues, following comments or debate, you
may wish to subscribe to "announce" and remove yourself from
"users".
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
Hello,
As customers who use a larger amount of bandwidth will be aware, the
predictive data transfer warnings we offer have had a tendency to
rapidly cycle between "warning" and "recovery" state just after the
reporting period starts.
This was reported here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/15
I'm happy to report that I believe this issue is now fixed.
As a reminder you can manage your data transfer warning settings
here:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/xfer/
including switching between predictive or "percentage used"
warnings, or disabling warnings entirely.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
Hi guys,
I am planning to resell hosting accounts on my VPS to businesses as part of
a web design and programming job that I do now. However, I appear to be
having some problems with bind9, and setting up my own nameservers. I
originally thought that a domain translates to an IP and that was the end of
it.
This is what I know so far:
-I need 2 subdomains, ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com
This is what I have no idea about:
-Do these subdomains have to be on different servers, or just different
IP's? Can they even use the same IP?
-If they need to be different, can my hosting server be on 1.2.3.4 if my
nameservers are: 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8
I have followed this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/dns-configuration.html in order
to set up my first nameserver, and it will now ping example.com if I set the
resolv.conf to use itself.
If I set turasmara.com to use that nameserver, and ping it from my home box
I do not get anything. However if I ping it from the VPS I get:
root@hostinghaven:~# ping turasmara.com
PING turasmara.com (1.2.3.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.domainname.com (1.2.3.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.018 ms
What have I done wrong...and what do I till need to do to get this to work?
Thank you,
Daniel
Hello,
I've just been looking at the CentOS network install. It works great
apart from one thing: anaconda/disk druid refuse to install directly
onto a disk device without a partition table. There appears to be no
way to work around this.
It's been a common theme with the Debian and Ubuntu installers and
with various other tools that they get a bit freaked out by the idea
of a filesystem directly on a block device, but in those cases there
have been workarounds.
So, what is so bad about having a partition table?
Well, assume that the customer has /dev/xvda with a filesystem
directly on it, no partition table, and they want to grow that. The
process is as follows:
1. We enlarge their volume on the host.
2. Some time later the customer shuts down and boot their VPS again
to see the larger /dev/xvda.
3. Customer then does resize2fs /dev/xvda to online grow their root
filesystem into the new space.
You have to admire the simplicity of this; it's pretty hard to get a
shut down / boot wrong, and then you just type "resize2fs" with no
parameters and it's done.
What a shame that's it's unsupported by every major Linux
distribution's installer.
Assume instead that the customer has a partitioned /dev/xvda with
xvda1 as / and xvda2 as a swap partition. Now the process is more
like:
1. We enlarge their volume on the host
2. Some time later the customer shuts down and boot their VPS again
to see the larger /dev/xvda.
3. Customer can't just enlarge xvda1 because the swap partition
xvda2 is in the middle. So, delete that.
4. Edit partition table to delete xvda1 and recreate it again
larger. Note that it fails to tell the OS about the new partition
layout because it's in use.
5. Reboot again to see the larger xvda1 device.
6. Online resize of xvda1 with resize2fs.
7. Recreate swap (or use swapfile).
You can see that the second process is much more complicated than
the first. Not only that but it contains a number of terrifying
steps such as step 4 where the partition for the root filesystem is
deleted. I shudder at the thought of inexperienced sysadmins doing
things like this. I don't like doing it myself.
Disk resizing is quite a common operation at BitFolk. It's a lot
more common than reinstalling. The first process (without partition
table) has been done by customers around 100 times according to my
records, and has never gone wrong that I know of.
So, another possible approach: every VPS is set up with LVM from the
start. xvda partitioned, small / (containing /boot) on xvda1, rest
of disk as xvda2 and used for LVM physical volume, broken up into
small logical volumes for /usr, /var, /home and swap. If more space
is needed it comes as xvdb, xvdc, xvd.., which the customer adds to
their PV and puts in LVM.
Advantages
- The most flexibility for future growth.
- Works in all major distribution installers.
Disadvantages
- I expect very few customers know how to drive LVM, and I don't
really want to be in the business of selling or giving away LVM
training.
- Makes it a bit harder for me to poke around in a customer's VPS
install from outside, which is sometimes requested. e.g. if it
becomes compromised.
Something between the last proposal and the one before it:
Strongly suggest that people who partition their disks (through
choice or because they want to use an installer that gives no choice
like the CentOS one) use LVM, but set up VPSes ourselves directly on
the block devices.
At least then the CentOS installer is usable. In the CentOS case
this could actually be enforced by using a kickstart recipe to
automatically partition the disk in some suggested way, although
this does rather take away some of the point of using an installer
(flexibility).
Anyone have any thoughts? Any tricks I've missed here?
Constraints imposed by Xen: First device (xvda or xvda1) must be
ext3, and must contain /boot.
Cheers,
Andy
--
>> I have just recently purchased a Feathercraft Big Kahuna kayak
> does it have a heater?
Of course not. Everyone knows you can't have your kayak and heat it.
-- James Fidell
We are having problems delivering mail to @btinternet.com addresses from
our VPS running Postfix on Debian Lenny. From the limited information I
found on Google it seems likely that the e-mails are being delivered but
then moved to the users webmail spam folder. In my case the (two) users
are not aware that they have webmail, but I believe they do (provided by
Yahoo?).
Here's a mail.log file extract (user name edited):
Dec 28 17:28:44 vs1 amavis[9066]: (09066-08) Passed CLEAN, [86.0.209.51]
[86.0.209.51] <martin(a)jset.net> -> <xyz(a)btinternet.com>, Message-ID:
<4D1A1E26.2060901(a)jset.net>, mail_id: BQJb5C4gVigN, Hits: -5, size:
6507007, queued_as: 41CD6E2F7, 1372 ms
Dec 28 17:28:44 vs1 postfix/smtp[9732]: 69772E2F3:
to=<xyz(a)btinternet.com>, relay=127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024, delay=74,
delays=73/0/0/1.4, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok, id=09066-08,
from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10025): 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 41CD6E2F7)
Dec 28 17:28:44 vs1 postfix/qmgr[5081]: 69772E2F3: removed
We use the same server for business and personal e-mails and the only
problem I'm aware of is with @btinternet.com addresses. Thunderbird on
the client machine is using the vs1 SMPT server with hostname jset.net.
Emails are delivered if we use our broadband provider's SMPT server (but
they are slow and frequently time out and not suitable for mobile working).
Any suggestions/configuration changes to debug this would be welcome.
Regards, Martin
Hello,
I hope you're all having a great Christmas.
As announced in UK's June budget, the standard UK VAT rate will
increase from 17.5% to 20% with effect from midnight on January 4th,
2011. Invoices for services that are provided after this date will
be showing VAT at 20% if you normally have to pay UK VAT.
If you pay by automated PayPal subscription then your payments will
be adjusted by us. PayPal will probably notify you of that over the
next couple of days.
If you normally receive PayPal or Google payment requests then these
will be for the new price.
If you normally pay by standing order then you're going to need to
change it. You can wait to receive the invoice (7 days before it
falls due) or you can have a look at
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/config/ which will tell you what
it's going to be.
Otherwise if you do manual payments by whatever means then please do
see the invoice for the correct amount.
If you have any questions please do let us know, either here or to
support(a)bitfolk.com.
Last time we changed prices (July), many people did not read their
invoices and carried on paying the old price. A lot of time was
spent trying to contact people to inform them of this, but even now
there are still some paying the wrong amount, who were fortunate
enough to have their service decrease in price and are slowly
building up credit.
This time we aren't going to be able to chase people beyond the
usual sequence of late payment reminders, so if you start receiving
notices of late payment please do contact us to find out why.
Finally I'd just like to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2011.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hello,
Today I have rewritten most of your VPS configs to allow you to boot
the Debian lenny netboot installer from Xen Shell.
Basically that means that if you wish to reinstall your VPS with
Debian lenny then you can do so yourself, and the process is almost
identical to any other netboot install of Debian.
There are more details here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer
Unfortunately a large number of existing customers have a style of
VPS configuration that is just not going to work for a netboot
install and that can't be fixed by me alone as it will require some
small modifications on your part; generally just the renaming of
some of your block devices.
Given that before today you had to contact support to ask for a
re-image, or do it yourself with the rescue environment and chroot
(which still works), this is hopefully not too much of a hardship
since your config can just be updated next time you ask for a
re-image. If you'd like it sorted out before then, then please by
all means open a support ticket.
I will now be adding Debian squeeze, then looking at Ubuntu Lucid,
Ubuntu Maverick and CentOS 5. You can follow progress of this at:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/7
Obviously the above feature request is for a means to do this from
the web panel, and that is still the eventual goal, but this is what
will underpin that and there's no need to make you wait for it.
Cheers,
Andy
--
"I'm /extremely/ miffed about today's events, and in my quest to try to make
you understand the level of my unhappiness I'm likely to use an awful lot
of what we would call /violent sexual imagery/, and I just wanted to check
that neither of you would be terribly offended by that." -- Malcolm Tucker
>> > For those running Exim <= 4.69 (the default Debian MTA), you should be
>> > aware there is an exploit for remote *root* code execution in the wild.
>>
>> I don't know whether to be worried or not...
>
> If you run Debian and have not updated in the last 2-3 days then yes
> you need to worry (and may already have been exploited).
>
>> dpkg-query -l exim
>> exim 3.36-18.2 An obsolete MTA (Mail Transport
>> Agent), replaced by exim4
>
> This is a virtual package designed to transition people to exim4
> from years ago. Try again with exim4. You want 4.69-9+lenny1, if
> we're talking about Debian lenny.
Is there anyway to confirm whether or not this exploit is still
exposed in the 3.36-18.2 package...someone on another list suggested
it was not...
(...not that it might not have other, different exploits or a stack of
other good reasons why it should be upgraded)
