BitFolk Users December 2017

users@mailman.bitfolk.com

4 participants
7 discussions

by Ian

Has anyone successfully used the version of certbot in jessie-backports to install https certificates from letsencrypt on Apache? The reason for asking is that I haven't :) It doesn't help that the version there is older than the one covered by the documentation at <https://certbot.eff.org/docs/using.html> - there's no 'certificates' command, for example. Ian

6 years

Problems upgrading to Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (16.04)

by Paul Lewis

Hi all, I was looking to upgrade my VPS to the latest Ubuntu release this afternoon but ran across a problem. Whenever I try to run "do-release-upgrade” I receive the following error: Checking for a new Ubuntu release Get:1 Upgrade tool signature [836 B] Get:2 Upgrade tool [1,265 kB] Fetched 1,266 kB in 0s (0 B/s) authenticate 'xenial.tar.gz' against 'xenial.tar.gz.gpg' gpg exited 1 Debug information: gpg: Signature made Wed 07 Dec 2016 09:10:01 GMT using RSA key ID C0B21F32 gpg: /tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-r7c80csz/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created gpg: BAD signature from "Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key (2012) <ftpmaster(a)ubuntu.com<mailto:ftpmaster@ubuntu.com>>" Authentication failed Authenticating the upgrade failed. There may be a problem with the network or with the server. Searching online<http://askubuntu.com/questions/842706/how-to-upgrade-ubuntu-if-i-get-authen…>, this looks like it could be a problem with the xenial.tar.gz file on the local repo cache. Has anyone else had similar problems, and if so, how did you resolve them? I suppose beyond that, has anyone successfully upgraded their Ubuntu VPS to 16.04? Were there any problems along the way? Thanks, Paul

6 years

Dear Entropy service users, what software uses /dev/random?

by Andy Smith

Hi, If you do not use BitFolk's Entropy service and have no interest in doing so then this email will be of little interest to you can be safely ignored. If you haven't heard about the Entropy service before, please see: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Entropy If you *do* use the Entropy service though, I'm interested to know what software you have that actually uses /dev/random (and not /dev/urandom). Some background to this question: To provide the Entropy service we use hardware entropy generators, currently exclusively a pair of EntropyKeys manufactured by a UK company called Simtec Electronics Ltd. Despite the fact that these were extremely popular little devices (compared to other fairly niche little gadgets), Simtec always had a supply problem and then Simtec imploded as a company, so as far as I know these are now impossible to obtain, the IP is lost forever etc. Although I have one spare EntropyKey ready to put in service should one of the two in service ever die (I've not experienced that yet), that left me slightly worried as to what I'd do if I needed to get more. Then I saw the OneRNG kickstarter, and decided to pledge. So now I have 5 of (the internal USB version of) these: http://onerng.info/ I've not yet gone any further than verifying that they keep the entropy pool full on the machine they're plugged into, but that's good enough for now. Could be a decade before one of my existing EntropyKeys dies. I have since heard that this device proved far more popular than its manufacturer expected (sense a theme?) and they're now extremely difficult to get hold of because they need to get a new batch made in China. I've had multiple people contacting me on the basis of a tweet I did about getting these, asking me to sell them mine (which I would, but they didn't want internal USB). The point I'm trying to make here is that the world of hardware random number generators is not one with reliable supply lines, unless you want to spend a fortune on some black box. So when I came across: http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/ I was sad that the nerdery that is the Entropy service may be misguided, but also happy with the possibility that I might never have to source a hardware RNG again. Let's just take the argument posited by the article, that all (Linux) software should just learn to love /dev/urandom¹, as true. If you don't agree with this claim, you are disagreeing with some pretty big names in crypto. The Hacker News commentary on the article may also prove of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149019 At the very least, I feel the Entropy article on the BitFolk Wiki needs an update in light of this. To justify the service's existence, if nothing else. Going further, the question becomes, well, what software is there in existence that forces use of /dev/random with no configuration that would allow otherwise? Because even if we agree that all software *should* be using urandom, if some popular software *refuses* to without recompile, then we're still going to have to provide an Entropy service, because doing so is easier than running non-packaged software. So Entropy service users, what have you got that uses /dev/random? Cheers, Andy ¹ A more correct summary of it is probably, "urandom is fine all the time except for on initial boot when a small amount of entropy from outside the CSPRNG is desirable." On shutdown all fairly modern Linuxes save the current entropy pool to the filesystem and load it up from there on boot, so it's only essential on first boot. -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

6 years, 2 months

Outage / unexpected shutdown+boot for VPSes on host "snaps", 2017-12-28 ~08:06Z – ~08:40Z

by Andy Smith

Hi, Around 08:06Z today we received an alert regarding host snaps.bitfolk.com. I found it completely unresponsive over network, but was still able to connect to its console. Despite it believing its network interfaces were up and had link, it was passing no traffic to the colo switches. I spent about 30 minutes trying to diagnose this and not getting anywhere, so decided to try rebooting it. As I had console access I was able to cleanly shut down all VPSes on snaps first. The shutdown and boot went without incident and things seemed fine on boot. By about 08:40Z all VPSes that should be running had been started, and by now Nagios is clear of alerts¹. I am aware that snaps had an unexplained outage a few months ago, on 28 September. This time the symptoms are not the same, other than that the problem is unexplained and clears after a reboot. Clearly there is something wrong there though and it's going to happen again, so over the next few days we will be moving customers off of snaps. We will co-ordinate this directly with customers involved. Apologies for the disruption, Andy BitFolk Ltd ¹ Except for one customer web server which is waiting for a TLS passphrase to be supplied before it will start. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

6 years, 3 months

Unreliable IPv6?

by Andreas Olsson

Greetings Is it just me, or has Bitfolk's IPv6 connectivity been a bit unreliably these last few months? These are the 5-minuter-or-longer IPv6 downtimes Pingdom has reported for both my two Bitfolk nodes. The times being in UTC, and rounded to the nearest full minutes. 2017-12-19: 07:38 to 07:48 2017-12-12: 17:27 to 17:49 2017-11-15: 18:29 to 18:36 2017-10-22: 09:59 to 10:21 2017-09-07: 00:23 to 00:45 2017-09-06: 15:17 to 15:39 // Andreas

6 years, 4 months

christmas drinks?

by Conrad Wood

Did I miss the call for christmas drinks or are there none this year?

6 years, 4 months

Cost of additional data transfer is halved

by Andy Smith

Hi, I've lowered the cost of 10GB of additional data transfer by half, so the changes are: ----------+-------+------ | Old | New ----------+-------------- Monthly | £0.50 | £0.25 Quarterly | £1.40 | £0.70 Yearly | £5.00 | £2.50 ----------+-------+------ If you do not already pay for additional monthly data transfer then the rest of this email probably won't be of interest. Those paying by Direct Debit will just be charged less. Those paying by PayPal have already had their subscription details altered and PayPal should have told you about that. Those paying by standing order will need to take care to adjust their regular payment otherwise you will be paying too much. It will build up as credit on your account. You can see the cost of your current spec at: https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/config/ Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

6 years, 4 months

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BitFolk Users December 2017