BitFolk Users

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1123 discussions

Can someone work out how to install and run RHEL then?

by Andy Smith

Hello, With the news that RHEL will be free for up to 16 servers: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/centos-is-gone-but-rhel-is-now-free… is anyone willing to spend some time trying to install it in a chroot then getting it to boot under Xen PVH mode? Assuming it is possible to access the RPM files, I assume the process will be very similar to the current CentOS 8 process: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Installing_CentOS_8 which can be summarised as: 1. Prepare a chroot 2. Install CentOS base system into it 3. Enable EPEL repository to switch it to kernel-ml package so that it works under Xen. I will provide the VM account to do it, and some amount of account credit once it is done and documented in the wiki. I have no idea what hoops one must jump through to get a Red Hat developer account nor if it is possible to download the RPMs like that once you do. If I did I'd do this myself! Please Contact me off-list if interested in helping out. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

4 years, 2 months

Fedora switched to zstd compression, so PVH mode is advised

by Andy Smith

Hello, I don't think there's many¹ of you running Fedora, but as of kernel-core-5.9.8-100.fc32 they switched their kernel compression method from gzip to zstd. Similarly to Ubuntu — which switched to lz4 from 19.10 onwards — this leaves it not bootable in Xen PV mode as the PV boot loader doesn't understand zstd (or lz4) compression. This may not be obvious to you as this has happened in the middle of a release and I don't think it is announced anywhere that the compression method was changed. Nor would such an announcement necessarily prepare you for the sudden boot failure in any case. The simplest way forward is to switch to PVH mode: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/PVH#Fedora If for some reason you don't want to switch to PVH mode², you will need to get a kernel that is not compressed with zstd. Possibly there are other kernels available for Fedora, or you could use extract-vmlinux to decompress the packaged one. Cheers, Andy ¹ We don't have an installer for it, but it can be installed from the Rescue VM, and at least two of you did that. ² I don't know of any reason not to use PVH mode. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

4 years, 2 months

A question for users of the backup service - what is a successful run?

by Andy Smith

Hi, A question for those who use the backup service¹: Currently we mark the backup run as successful if rsync exits with a success value. There are only two exceptions: exit code 2 and exit code 24. Both of those relate to files which rsync thought existed but ended up not existing when it came to actually transfer them. I consider those transient issues related to backing up a filesystem that is in use, and not a reason to consider the whole backup run as failed. So what about files that our rsync process cannot read? At the moment that produces an exit code of 23, and is considered a failed run, even though everything else got transferred. This eventually causes a "backup age" monitoring alert because the last successful backup run was too long ago. Even though everything else is actually being backed up. If we consider error code 23 as okay then a backup run that failed to transfer one or more files due to permissions is still considered a success and the alert goes away. But you possibly never find out about what happened because you don't get to see the logs, you would have to check every file in your backups to be sure they're there. If we continue to consider error code 23 as a failure of the whole run then you will have to either allow our rsync to read the files concerned or else put up with perpetual alerts - which you could silence but then would never tell you about other problems. What should we do? Note that most of you allow our rsync to run as root so it can generally read everything and you'll never experience this. But in theory you could if you found some way to deny root permission to read something. I would ask for opinions only from those who make use of the backup service, as root or not. Cheers, Andy ¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

4 years, 2 months

India xen VPS provider recommendations?

by enquiries＠karmacomputing.co.uk

4 years, 2 months

2020-12-27 ~00:00 – ~00:45 internal packet loss and alerts regarding "clockwork" and "limoncello"

by Andy Smith

Hi, As of about 0000Z we started receiving alerts of packet loss and began investigation. It was found to be an internal issue between hosts "clockwork" and "limoncello" only. That is, everything on both hosts was reachable from outside our network and also from inside as long as it wasn't between those two hosts. As there is a monitoring node on "limoncello", a number of alerts were sent out regarding customer services on "clockwork" that it considered to be down, but they weren't actually down - unless you happened to be hosted on "limoncello", anyway, and vice versa. I tracked the issue to one of the two bonded switch ports for "clockwork"; bringing that interface down and up again appears to have cleared it. That happened at about 0045Z. If the problem reoccurs we can down the interface and have it run on one interface until the port or switch can be changed. If the problem is actually in the NIC of the server itself things will be more tricky, but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

4 years, 3 months

Docker swarm / VPS networking issues

by Chris Smith

Hi, I’m trying and failing to get overlay network traffic working between Docker containers on different VPS hosts. The issue seems to be that neither host is sending VXLAN data on port 4789. I’ve been getting help on Docker’s IRC channel and the suggestion there is that issues have been seen before with this and interaction with other virtualisation technologies (VMware, for example) which also use VXLAN. Does anyone know if there are issues using swarm/overlay networking between Xen VPS hosts? Regards, Chris — Chris Smith <space.dandy(a)icloud.com>

4 years, 4 months

Host "elephant" needed to be power cycled just now

by Andy Smith

Hi, At around 00:15Z we started receiving alerts regarding some servers on host "elephant". Looking at the machine's console it was reporting errors with its SAS controller, and was generally unresponsive to anything requiring block IO, so I had no choice but to power cycle it. On boot I couldn't find any issue with its SAS controller, and it was able to find all its storage devices and seemingly boot normally. The last few customer VPSes have finished booting as I type this. I will keep an eye on things for the next few hours and let you know about further actions. Please accept my apologies for the disruption. This is unrelated to the problems with "elephant" last month which were tracked down to a kernel bug. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

4 years, 4 months

Developer discount (5%)

by Andy Smith

Hi, A few days ago someone asked if we would match a 5% discount that another hosting company offered to developers of significant open source projects. After thinking about it for a bit I decided we would. So, if you are a registered Debian/Ubuntu Developer, Fedora maintainer, BSD committer etc etc please feel free to email support(a)bitfolk.com and ask if you qualify. When you do, please provide some sort of link to your work so we can verify it. More information here: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Developer_discount Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

4 years, 4 months

Some notes on BitFolk's plans to switch to PVH mode

by Andy Smith

Hello, This email doesn't discuss anything that you need to change (or in fact CAN change, at the moment), it's mostly a status update and fishing for feedback so can be safely ignored. As you may know, all BitFolk VPSes currently run under Xen PV (paravirtual) mode. We would like to switch to PVH mode instead. Here's some notes about our investigations of PVH mode: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/PVH On the one hand we can get started right away: BitFolk's hypervisors support it, the newer stable releases of Debian and Ubuntu support it, the mainline kernel supports it, the rescue VM will work, etc etc. All new customers can be run in PVH mode as long as they don't choose an older release. On the other hand, it's not quite that simple as there's still a huge amount of existing customers whose kernels won't support it. I think it probably makes sense to immediately switch the Rescue VM to PVH mode, and make all installers also use it where the chosen install is known to support it. i.e. make it so that if you go and install Debian buster or testing or Ubuntu 20.04 right now, it silently switches you to PVH mode, because it's known to work. At the same time, we can add a Xen Shell command to toggle you between PV and PVH so you can try it out. If it doesn't work you could switch back, try again later at your own leisure etc. We don't know what Linux distribution you are running and can't tell without snooping on your console, so we can't make a good enough guess on your behalf. I don't really want to make a big thing of this because it's too complicated, so I'm thinking of hiding it away unless you need it. New customers / installs shouldn't have to think about it. It's only a concern for those of you with older, possibly 32-bit installs. For that reason I don't think I want to expose any of these details on the web panel or allow switching of the guest type there. On the subject of 32-bit PV support the deadlines are fairly laid back as — assuming you have no need of running a 5.9+ kernel — 32-bit PV booting could possibly¹ continue to work until 2023, which is the security support EOL for the last version of Xen that will support it. We're currently using Xen 4.10 and 4.12, and with the release of Debian 11 (bullseye) I will probably be looking to rolling upgrade to that with Xen 4.14. Any questions or thoughts on this? Cheers, Andy ¹ It is conceivable that some new CPU side channel attack lands and it's found that there is no way to stop a PV guest from snooping on the memory of the hypervisor or other PV guests. In that case there will be a sudden scramble to switch everyone. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

4 years, 4 months

Debian now has a "crossgrader" package

by Andy Smith

Hello, Perhaps of interest to those of you still on 32-bit installs¹, Debian now has a "crossgrader" package that has just had its first version uploaded to the "unstable" suite: https://salsa.debian.org/crossgrading-team/debian-crossgrading/ I have used this manual process: https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading many times to go from i386 to amd64, but it is unsupported and scary and depending on the exact packages you have installed can be very tricky. It will ask you to approve actions that may destroy your system. I haven't yet had chance to try "crossgrader" myself yet, but I will try it next time I have to do this. I would be interested in reading your experiences of using it. I gather that it would be wise to fully upgrade to the latest stable release (buster) on i386 before trying to crossgrade to amd64, either by this method or manually. For those keen to switch to 64-bit, much of the benefits can be obtained without most of the risk by only changing your kernel to the amd64 architecture. After following the wiki article above to the end of the "Install a kernel that supports both architectures in userland" section, you would: 1. Connect to Xen Shell and use the "console" command if not already in it. 2. Halt your VPS. 3. Use the Xen Shell "arch" command to switch to x86-64 bootloader. 4. Use the Xen Shell "boot" command to boot it. 5. When your own grub menu appears, select the amd64 kernel that is listed, not the i686 one. Provided everything seems to work okay you can then remove the i686 kernel packages, and the system will keep the -amd64 kernel packages up to date. Your VPS is then a 64-bit one running a 64-bit kernel but with almost entirely 32-bit userland. Changing over the 32-bit userland by either the crossgrader package or manually is where most of the complexity lies. For context as to why you might want to switch away from 32-bit: - The next major Xen release will remove 32-bit PV support. We'll switch to PVH mode before then to allow remaining 32-bit guests to still run. - At the recent Xen Developer summit it was stated that "anyone still running 32-bit PV is setting fire to 30% of their CPU". - All manner of 32-bit-specific fixes, including security, are being delayed and overlooked in the upstream Linux kernel, so switching away from running an i686 kernel would be a good idea. Cheers, Andy ¹ 41.1% of customer VMs, according to our database. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

4 years, 5 months

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