Hi,
I want to set up a nightly backup on to the 2GB archive storage that comes with my VPS.
Is there a beginner's guide of how to configure/access it?
Ta,
Hugh
Hi,
Continued use of Twitter has become untenable so I will move
"bitfolk" on Twitter to a Fediverse ("Mastodon") instance. The
question is which one?
The current Twitter account doesn't see much use but it's probably
of most use for posting about current incidents and maintenance
work. Therefore it needs to work even if BitFolk is not working. So
it should not run on an instance that's inside BitFolk
infrastructure.
I can run an instance outside of BitFolk infrastructure but I don't
think the cost will be worth it vs the limited use.
Perhaps it is best to just put it on an instance that is already in
mainstream use?
If you are currently active on the Fediverse, could you let me know
which instance you use? Feel free to let me know your full address if
you'd like me/others to follow you. 😀
My personal account is grifferz(a)social.bitfolk.com. ¹
Assuming I get some replies to this, I'll probably put a bitfolk one
on some instance that you already use. I'll let you know once that
happens. They have RSS feeds so even those who don't use the
Fediverse would be able to keep track of posts there.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ This is a Mastodon instance running at bitfolk but I don't have
any intention of opening this to other users, as I don't think I'm
prepared for the workload of managing such a user community.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
On fediverse/mastodon etc.
As a person who studiously avoids social media in most of it's forms
other than closed family groups and/or very special interest groups etc
My experience of the fediverse and mastodon is very limited (Other
clients and instances apply,,,,, apparently).
I think social media should be there though for those that want it.
I did look briefly into Mastodon on behalf of a Hackspace or two I was
involved in, but as with such groups achieving any form of consensus on
moving to something when the end of the social world was not nigh was a
bit of a struggle, so it flopped. (Cat herding)
Mastodon/fediverse all felt a bit nebulous or vapour like, and clarity
on what was where and what the support and keeping needed to be was a
bit of a struggle too. There is certainly a lot of fediverse evangelism
though.
Email can be complex, very complex, especially for larger org's but is
at least a well defined and documented target free from the sort of
evangelism that hides (even if accidentally) what is going on really.
Its established nature also makes it a touch boring but dependable.
Perhaps why I like email as a mailing list/discussion forum.
On the discussion around this.
It feels like the federative protocols etc are a useful and desirable
thing. But that the requirement for a unique id tied to a single
instance that can not be cloned and fed from multiple instances is an issue.
It feels like you are constrained to take a punt on a.n.other provider
or run your own instance. So perhaps a +1 for making it look distributed
but a -1 for distributed content resilience. Surely a postings content
should be as valuable as say who posted it or whether they followed or not.
Hemingway observed the only way to find out if you can trust someone is
to trust them and see how it turns out. So if you are not going to run
your own home instance, flip a coin and go with it. Any decision without
full knowledge (perfect strategy) is to some degree or other a coin flip.
If you are not running your own instance then you run pretty similar
risks of becoming the product at some random future date as you do
sticking with twitter. See previous note about not being an advocate to
something I would never use anyway, except under duress.
I don't think anyone is about to fall victim to supposing that twitter
users in any way endorse the views of anyone else on twitter, and those
that run it are no different than any other user.
There are other social media platforms though where this could be argued
were not the case, Truth Social springs to mind as a potential case in
point. Your view point may vary though.
Which brings you back to the option of stay as is and wait to see what
happens with twitter, or run your own instance of the fediverse as a
closed membership for bitfolk, but able to converse with all else on the
fediverse. At least this reduces your exposure to becoming someone elses
product and means you can backup your own content in a way that you can
recover from failures.
Should bitfolk run it's own instance and then fail I think we would all
have more pressing concerns than preserving the content or list of
followers.
Maybe I value the content more than a list of followers though. But that
is not really saying much.
There is the counter argument that loosing the content at regular
intervals is a very good thing. It reduces the weaponisation of quoting
past content during flame wars.
The decision then when looking into a unique home instance, is
intrinsically the same one as why run your own mailing list compared to
say using a google group instance etc.
Just some thoughts for what they are worth
Cheers
Andy Kirby
--
andy(a)kirbyand.co.uk
www.kirbyand.co.uk
Good morning folks,
My VPS is on Ubuntu 18.04 and it's plainly time to upgrade. And as I have some time off between Christmas and New Year, I figured I should do it then.
I see that there's a few possible gotchas to do with PV/PVH mode and supported kernel compression methods... so I thought I'd ask if anyone's done an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, and what tips they have.
I was thinking of starting the upgrade, then switching virtmode in the Xen shell before the first reboot. Will that work? Or does it need to be a clean VM boot rather than just a restart for it to work?
Or is it better to try to get 18.04 working with PVH (using the HWE kernel) and then do the upgrade?
Any other gotchas that folks have encountered? The VPS just runs email (exim4/dovecot) and apache, I don't expect any issues with them, and I'm familiar enough with them that I can fix any oddities that do crop up. It's just the kernel/Xen changes that have me being cautious...
Thanks,
Phil
Hi,
We are experiencing some problems with host "talisker" and I'm currently
looking into it.
We are likely going to have to do an emergency reboot in a monent.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Thank you.
Fwiw I would prefer a status API and website over an email. If the API could list upcoming maintenance as well as current issues, it would be very useful to me.
Conrad
On 14 November 2022 14:31:27 GMT, Andy Smith via RT <support(a)rt.bitfolk.com> wrote:
>Hi Conrad,
>
>On Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 02:21:31PM +0000, Conrad Wood via RT via support wrote:
>> On Mon, 2022-11-14 at 13:17 +0000, Conrad Wood via BitFolk Users wrote:
>> > I started to receive some errors on a bitfolk dns server.
>> > It seems to indicate the DNS Server no longer listens on port 53
>> > (well,
>> > or some firewall blocks it - I don't know).
>> > Any ideas?
>
>Sorry, I was doing a little bit of work on it and didn't think anyone
>would notice! It is back running again now and I don't expect to have
>to shut it down again. We will send a notification of maintenance in
>future.
>
>Cheers,
>Andy
>
>--
>https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
>
>
>
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
I started to receive some errors on a bitfolk dns server.
It seems to indicate the DNS Server no longer listens on port 53 (well,
or some firewall blocks it - I don't know).
Any ideas?
[14/11/2022 13:08:01.159] [192.168.59.1] [prober-server]: "FAILED :
Prober dns_resolve mail.conradwood.com: [STATUS] : [dns server
a.authns.bitfolk.co.uk ([2001:ba8:1f1:f085::53]:53),
target=mail.conradwood.com]: lookup mail.conradwood.com on
127.0.0.1:53: read udp [2001:ba8:1f1:f0bd::2]:59986-
>[2001:ba8:1f1:f085::53]:53: read: connection refused [/STATUS]"
Hi,
Since the first point release of Ubuntu 22.04 has now been and gone,
those of you with older Ubuntu installations will now be prompted with
suggestions to upgrade to it.
That should go fine, as long as you are running 64-bit (amd64) and in
PVH mode. If you aren't then it won't be able to boot, as the Ubuntu
kernel uses a compression method not known to our PV mode bootloader.
To switch to PVH mode you should do this from the Xen Shell:
xen shell> virtmode pvh
It will then take effect from the next boot. If it somehow doesn't work
for you, you can switch back:
xen shell> virtmode pv
(and then please let us know so we can investigate)
PVH mode has been the default for all new VMs here for two years now,
but many existing customers are still running in PV mode.
There's more information about PVH mode here, but really it is an
implementation detail that you don't need to pay any attention to:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/PVH
Those running 32-bit Ubuntu have no upgrade path at all since 18.04 was
the last Ubuntu release that supported 32-bit. Those wanting to upgrade
from 32-bit Ubuntu 18.04 are probably going to be best off asking for a
new VM to run for free for two weeks, and move their stuff into that:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Migrating_to_a_new_VPS
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
The recent question reminds me - since leaving for another VPS provider,
the various VPSes have had various difficulties with getting emails from
them accepted by the dominant Google / Microsoft / Yahoo services.
In one case, the content - requested activity alerts from a message board -
hasn't changed, and the volume is way *way* under anything suspiciously
spambot-y - a hundred emails a week, not per second - but Microsoft have
simply refused to accept email to users that have Hotmail / Outlook
accounts, despite the only significant change being the IP address it comes
from.
This is even after jumping through all of the hoops in the sometimes very
outdated Microsoft 'help' (sic) pages: I strongly suspect that they are
blocking the new provider's whole IP address space (or nearly so...)
Despite having various filters set up to say 'no, it's not spam, how many
times do I have to tell you', Gmail still keeps wanting to label fail2ban,
logwatch, and other system report emails as spam.
I look at
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-ye…
and go 'at least it isn't just me' and 'I hope someone takes the oligarchs
to someone with teeth', but before I lose all my hair..
.. can you still get emails delivered from Bitfolk VPSes to the three
reliably to inboxes?
Ian
