Hi,
Some security issues have been found in the hypervisor software we
use, which we have to fix as they can theoretically allow privilege
escalation.
They are under embargo until Thursday 31 October, so we will most
likely do the work in the early hours of the morning (UK time) on
29, 30, and 31 October.
As usual this will entail a clean shutdown of your guest and then a
boot again 20–30 minutes later after the patching is done. Some time
next week an email will go out telling you of the two hour window in
which this work will take place for each of your VMs.
If the assigned window is unacceptable to you, we can most likely
move your VM to an already-patched host at a time of your choosing
before 31 October. When the direct email comes to let you know of
your maintenance window, if it's not acceptable then you can reply
to it to open a support ticket and we will work it out.
As usual, if you have opted in to suspend/restore then your guest
will be suspended to disk and restored again instead of shutdown and
booted. More info on that:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore
For our own maintenance work we like to give more than 2 weeks of
notice. Unfortunate when dealing with security issues there is an
agreed embargo process and notice periods are much shorter. It is
preferable that there is ~2 weeks of notice rather than a "0-day"
exploit being unleashed.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
Hi users!
I've been a happy Bitfolk customer for some time and now I'm looking at
adding some more storage to my VPS.
In the past I've always taken the 5GiB packages. This time I see that there
is now Archival Storage in 50GiB packages.
I've read the docs at https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Archive_storage but am
writing here to see if anyone has any practical experience with these
packages.
Whatever I choose, I'll keep all my existing packages: I'm just looking to
add new ones.
Having been a Bitfolk customer for so long, am I correct in assuming that
the disks that power these packages are similar technology to what my
entire VPS ran on a few years ago?
I'm definitely in two minds. I want the storage for IMAP... and as everyone
knows, IMAP and RDBMS are all about the number of spindles. ...but if I
only have a small handful of users (albeit ones who all have their phones
connected almost all the time), would everything stick nicely in the page
cache and spare me noticing the performance of the underlying storage?
So, if anyone has any direct experience reports of the performance of
Archival Storage, especially under an IMAP workload, I'd love to hear them!
Thanks!
(If I take the Archival Storage, I'll move my own mailbox first and try it
out for a while. If I take the 5GiB package I'll just add it to the
existing device and grow the volume.)
Best wishes,
@ndy
--
andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0x7EBA75FF
Hi,
A few customers have been testing this for a while now, and it's
been a while since the last issues were addressed, so now seems like
a good time to announce it.
We're going to be retiring our Cacti instance¹ in favour of the new
setup which can be found at:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/grafana/
You all already have access to it.
Those who are familiar with Prometheus and Grafana may be a little
disappointed: this is not intended to be a full hosted instance,
only a fairly locked-down replacement for what Cacti provides. I'm
satisfied that it goes beyond the functionality and usability of
Cacti, but it isn't like having your own setup and isn't intended to
be.
Everyone has a default dashboard exposing graphs similar to those
provided by Cacti, plus a few more besides.
The offer was always open for more of your metrics to be graphed by
Cacti, but as of today only one customer was making use of that. The
offer is still open for us to graph extra metrics from you if you
wish. To do that you'll first need to install Node Exporter² and
then send a support ticket. You'll then get an additional
dashboard that looks like a bit like this:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/grafana/dashboard/snapshot/fysbHKJGqJm3Fq6KmtqlRJ…
Over the next week or two a wiki article for our Grafana will appear
and any references to Cacti on our web sites and docs will start to
disappear, except for a pointer to historical Cacti graphs. Update
of Cacti graphs is going to be disabled very soon.
Feedback on the service is still welcome of course, though the
general approach is by now pretty much decided.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/
² Available as your usual kind of single Go binary from here:
https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter
but also available in modern Debian (at least) as a package.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
Hi,
I've been working towards replacing our aging and creaky Cacti¹
installation with something more modern, based on Prometheus and
Grafana.
I think it's nearing the stage of being able to take over from Cacti
now, so I would like some volunteers to have a go at using it, give
feedback etc.
If you would be willing to do so, please drop me an email off-list
and I'll enable you to log in to it (with your usual BitFolk
credentials). Cacti will continue running in the meantime so there
is nothing to lose, only some time spent using it.
The goal here is not to offer a full hosted Grafana/Prometheus
setup, as that would be rather complicated and there are companies
that already do that as their entire paid service offering. I'm just
trying to replace the functionality of our Cacti, which for
customers basically amounts only to bandwidth and CPU graphs.
We can do a little better than this — in particular, block device
graphs have been pretty easy to add — but that's the sort of scope I
am looking at for right now.
Once we're happy with it, Cacti is going to stop gathering any
further measurements.
After you've had a play for a bit, feedback to this thread is
welcome, or to me personally if you'd rather.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
