Hello,
I realised yesterday after receiving a ticket where a customer asked
what was going on with the VPS specs, that I had not actually posted
anything on this announce list about the hardware refresh and
related VPS spec upgrades that are ongoing.
I have to remedy that now, because to a customer who knows nothing
of this upgrade process it just looks like we are selling better
spec VPSes to new customers and leaving existing customers to pay
inflated prices indefinitely. That means many of you are now going
to receive the same information you already know, so sorry about
that.
Back in July I said that VPS spec upgrades were coming soon:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150713.213922.6b419596.en.html
There was more initial delay than I would have liked:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20150802.112450.2c7d67f5.en.html
…but since September things have been proceeding fairly rapidly and
at this point just over 36% of the customer base has been upgraded.
I made a wiki page which I update regularly:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Hardware_refresh,_2015-2016
At the moment because of external pressures on which machines must
be removed from colo first we've had to be more selective about
which customers we offered upgrades to¹, but I think we are quite
close (weeks away) to the point where we can just ask the whole
remaining customer base who wants to be upgraded, and proceed mostly
in order of response.
A big down side of doing things this way is that we have many months
where existing customers are stuck paying the same price for a lower
spec than that which new customers can get, and in many cases
hitting a renewal point and paying again for the lower spec.
We would love to have been able to just cut over to higher specs in
one go. As the majority of customers pick the smallest plan, and the
upgrade from 480M to 1,024M is more than double, that would require
us to have about double the RAM available immediately and it just
wasn't feasible.
We have been able to provide pro rata service credit for those
finding their new spec more than they need and requesting a
downgrade mid-contract.
If you have any questions, please have a read of the wiki link above
and if not answered there then do let us know.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ In fact it is more like which customers we force upgrades upon,
because the response rate is only about 20%, yet we still need the
older machines cleared of customers.
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hello,
So as to avoid missing out on our chosen venue I'm thinking about
booking a table for the Christmas drinks in the next couple of days.
I don't think I want to go through the whole doodlepoll business to
find the most-wanted day as it takes ages and hasn't been that much
of a reliable indicator of who will turn up anyway!
I am just going to say: it's going to be the first week of December,
either Tuesday 1st, Wednesday 2nd or Thursday 3rd.
So on to venue. De Hems always seems to be a popular choice, but is
there anywhere else that anyone likes better?
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Dear All
I logged into my vps around 21:00 CET today using ssh. When I typed the
command *ls* it took quite a while (5 to 20 seconds - these things are
hard to tell when one does not measure it with a clock).
I also tried to request a page from my web server which did not work. I
do apologize for not knowing the exact error anymore.
Finally, *git pull origin master* against the repository on my vps got a
time out.
When I tried all the above mentioned things again a few minutes later
things were back to normal.
Now, what could that have been?
Regards,
Sam
--
Sämi Bächler
Obere Bläsistrasse 1, 8049 Zürich
M: +4179 478 4942
P: +4143 817 4628
Hello BitFolk People
I'm about to install Debian on my shiny new SSD-based BitFolk VPS, in the standard configuration with 1GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.
And the first question is: Should I, in 2015, go for 64 bits or 32 bits?
* The BitFolk rescue environment supports 64 bits now.
* Addressing 1GB of RAM is not an issue.
* Will a 64-bit system run faster? Or slower?
* Will 64-bit executables waste precious disk space?
For a long time, running 64-bit systems involved various hacks and workarounds and 32-bit libraries for software that was not yet compiled for 64 bits. Is the opposite happening yet? -- i.e. is it becoming necessary to allow for software that no longer supports 32 bits?
Any suggestions and advice will be appreciated.
Cheers,
Chris
Hi,
There's been quite a run of gmail believing that all email from our
Request Tracker was spam and automatically filing it into your spam
folder.
So, if you use gmail please could you have a look in your spam
folder and see if there is any bitfolk email in there, and if so
please do mark it as "not spam".
Meanwhile I have added DKIM, SPF and DMARC to emails from
support(a)rt.bitfolk.com so hopefully this is less likely to happen in
future.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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> Author: Andy Smith
> Date: 2015-11-11 04:38 -000
Hi Andy.
Thanks for the help, I do appreciate that Bitfolk is a service for
real geeks and that support for installations is not part of the deal.
Your support is one of the reasons why Bitfolk is special :)
> I'm sorry to see
> you're having problems. Here's an asciicast I just made of me
> installing Ubuntu 14.04 i686 on the same host that you're on:
>
> https://asciinema.org/a/ckiwp5sm75kbll77wj3r23myt
I watched the asciicast and what you did is pretty well what I did.
The main difference was the partitioning. When I did the first and
subsequent installs the partitions were already there and I just
labelled and formatted them. You deleted everything and started from
scratch.
The other difference is that for the first and last attempts I took
the LAMP and encryption options. These two installations both booted
but with error messages and I was unable to ssh into them. It is
running like that now. The installations without those options would not boot.
>
>I suspect what has happened to you is that somehow grub-pc (GrUB 2.x)
> has become installed. Only grub-legacy is supported at the moment¹,
> but the self-installer is not meant to leave you with grub-pc, so it's
> still a bug.
I hate GrUB2 :) I always had the feeling that it was designed for and
by enterprise users. On your screencast you were offered a grub boot
menu. I did not see this on mine.
> The other thing it might be is that I see you have a quite interesting
> partition layout.
I mentioned this above. I am happy to do another install deleting the
partitions and doing exactly what you did.
> broken install still exist, for me to examine?
Yes. It is running. I will not touch it until you have given me the
all clear. I am happy to give you my login details.
> Depends what "could not log in" means. :) >
I tried to ssh to the IP address and received an instant 'connection
refused'. It did not respond to ping.
The strange thing is that I just tried again, received a response to
ping and to ssh:
$ ssh zaphod(a)85.119.83.139
zaphod(a)85.119.83.139's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
I typed in the password very carefully three times and checked that
the caps lock were not on.
> You should have seen a block of text printed before the login prompt
> which tells you what the (randomly-generated) credentials are.
I did see the instructions but there was no block of text telling me
the credentials. I suspect that it disappeared because I touched
something but left the login prompt. I am not a screen user and it
took me longer than it should to escape from the login prompt :( Once
I did that I did succeed in logging in to the rescue environment.
>
> Did yours not look like that? If it did, then clearly this is still
> too confusing.
It did and it was confusing to someone who is not used to screen. I
did control + a k to kill the session but it returned to the same
login screen when I made a fresh connection. It was later that I found
contol + ] that returned me to the Xen shell. Later I saw that on the
initial screen it tells about control + ] but it was not visible when
I needed it.
> Do you have any suggestions on how to make this
> clearer?
Maybe a 'how to get out of here if your login fails' hint at the login
screen? I guess the typical Bitfolk customer would not need that sort
of help.
Thanks again.
Steve
I am doing a clean install on a new ssd disk while my old installation
is still running. The first installation was messed up so I decided
to start again on the zen console.
I ran install ubuntu_trusty, went through the installation procedure,
formatted the drives, no encryption, used only the basic server and
opensshd options, watched it shutdown and then ran the boot command.
This it what it gave me:
xen-shell> status
Guest: Shutdown
xen-shell> boot
Booting instance: simpee
Parsing config from /etc/xen/simpee.conf
libxl: error: libxl_bootloader.c:628:bootloader_finished: bootloader
failed - consult logfile /var/log/xen/bootloader.113.log
libxl: error: libxl_exec.c:118:libxl_report_child_exitstatus:
bootloader [-1] exited with error status 1
libxl: error: libxl_create.c:1022:domcreate_rebuild_done: cannot
(re-)build domain: -3
libxl: error: libxl_dom.c:35:libxl__domain_type: unable to get domain
type for domid=113
Unable to attach console
libxl: error: libxl_exec.c:118:libxl_report_child_exitstatus: console
child [0] exited with error status 1
xen-shell> status
Guest: Shutdown
xen-shell>
Just to be sure I repeated the install twice with the same result. The
first installation did boot up with a similar error message but I
could not log in after booting
It might be because the new IP address 85.119.83.139 has not been
updated in the DNS records. Maybe I missed something in in the
installation options?
Then I tried to work out what was going on using the Bitfolk Rescue
Environment. This gave me a 'Rescue' login prompt. It is not clear
which user name and password it needs but I tried both the Bitfolk and
Ubuntu users but could not log in.
Can anyone give me any pointers?
Steve
Could someone please help me with setting up nameservers on a new
Bitfolk VPS (Debian Jessie with ISPConfig 3).
My old server has hostname vs1.vconsult.co.uk and the new one is
vs2.vconsult.co.uk
I currently use an external provider for Primary and Secondary DNS but
would now like to run my own nameservers.
vconsult.co.uk is hosted on UK2 who do not appear to support glue
records, needed for nameservers.
I have other domains that I could use on Fasthosts, who do appear to
support glue records.
So based on my limited knowledge of setting up nameservers, the options
I have are:
1. Transferring vconsult.co.uk to another registrar such as Fasthosts
and setting up ns1.vconsult.co.uk and ns2.vconsult.co.uk with glue records.
2. Changing the hostname on my new VPS to use a Fasthosts hosted domain
e.g. vs2.example.com and setting up ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com
with glue records .
3. Using a Fasthosts hosted domain to set up ns1.example.com and
ns2.example.com on the current hostname vs2.vconsult.co.uk
For Option 1 I'm not keen in case the transfer results in a break in
web/email services?
For Option 2 I'm not sure if there are any issues with changing the
hostname of the VPS, and would prefer to use my 'company' domain?
For Option 3 I'm not sure whether nameservers based on 'example.com' can
reside on vs2.vconsult.co.uk?
Any advice appreciated, sorry if this is a bit basic for most on the list.
Martin
