Hello,
In late 2015 / early 2016 when we started switching to all-SSD
storage, some customers expressed a wish for cheaper but less
performant archive storage.
This is now available for purchase in blocks of 50GiB at £0.40+VAT
per month, £1.10+VAT per quarter or £4.00+VAT per year. It's
therefore one tenth the price of regular SSD storage.
If you'd like to purchase some then please send an email to
support(a)bitfolk.com. At the moment we would need to move your VPS to
different servers to give you access to archive storage, but that
tends to only take a couple of minutes.
Here's some more information on this:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Archive_storage
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
— John Levine
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Hi,
I'd like to experiment with deduplicating backups. Here's some
previous experimentation I already did:
http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2017/01/10/xfs-reflinks-and-deduplication/
Given that what I am proposing to test involves using the 4.9.x
range of kernels, a git checkout of xfsprogs, and an experimental
mkfs.xfs option, it is clearly not without risk. And understandably
I suspect most people don't want to play with such risk when it's
their backups at stake. I've had ~100GiB of my own backups running
under this for a couple of weeks and I think it's been okay, but
still…
So to hopefully get things started I'm prepared to offer the first
2GiB of backups for free. And I'll offer a 25% discount on backup
space beyond that. And I'll sell it in 1GiB blocks, not 5GiB ones.
So that's £0.06/GiB/month, or £0.17/GiB/quarter, or £0.60/GiB/year.
If you are interested in giving it a go please drop an email to
support(a)bitfolk.com. As I say, it will be free for up to 2GiB. But
it might break horribly and have to be withdrawn at any time, so I
won't be at all surprised if you can't be bothered with that sort of
faff.
The boring old backup service still exists:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups
Cheers,
Andy
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https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
From around 02:50 for about 1 hour there was an outage of the
authoritative DNS service on a.authns.bitfolk.co.uk. Those of you
making use of the service probably could not fail to notice as you
will have received PROBLEM and then RECOVERY alerts about it for
each domain.
This was simply due to me making a mistake in a firewall rule. :( It
was a bit more complicated than that as it didn't take effect until
hours after some other change I made and even while seeing the
alerts myself it took me some time to work out exactly what had
happened.
Auth. DNS service was still working on {b,c}.authns.bitfolk.com so
this shouldn't have had too bad an effect on actual service.
Somewhat ironically, this happened due to work I was doing to
isolate a.authns to make it safer to make changes! Once that is
completed it should be harder to break it in this fashion.
Apologies for the disruption,
Andy
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Hi Peeps!
I hope you're all having a good New Year.
Please find attached some details of some talks we're hosting at the BCS
near Covent Garden on Thursday.
I think these will be interesting and relevant to you guys; they're about
the Investigatory Powers Act and The Dark Web. It should be an excellent
evening.
Regards,
@ndy
--
andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0x7EBA75FF
Hello,
According to:
https://twitter.com/0xDUDE/status/813865069218037760
someone is now wiping out the contents of open MongoDB servers and
demanding payment in Bitcoins to return the data.
A good reminder to properly secure things like MongoDB by only
letting them run on localhost, and/or firewalling them off.
Open MongoDB is one of the things we nag you about but don't go any
further than nagging.
Cheers,
Andy
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Hi,
As you may be aware there are a few things that we (or third party
services on our behalf) scan for on our own network. A
non-exhaustive list of these things are:
- Open SNMP servers
- Open DNS resolvers
- Open portmapper services
- Open MongoDB / Memcached / Elasticsearch / Redis
- Open Remote Desktop
- Open multicast DNS (Avahi)
- Open TFTP server
- SSLv3/Poodle vulnerable services
…and so on.
Where these can only negatively affect the operator of the service
(e.g. SSLv3/Poodle or an open MongoDB), we are content to just email
you forever.
However, many of these problems are worth scanning for because they
are easily and frequently used to attack other hosts. For example,
any "chatty" UDP protocol like portmapper or DNS can receive spoofed
requests which will amplify, making for a DDoS on a third party.
So, when we email customers about these it's because we need them
fixed.
Unfortunately some customers are either not receiving these emails
or are happy to ignore them, for months at a time, basically until
we open a support ticket with them and ask why they aren't dealing
with it. This is taking up too much human time.
"We did not receive the email" is now no longer a valid excuse
because there is provision in our web panel for an
emergency/alternate contact:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/contacts/#toc-address-book
If we've been emailing a customer for weeks about this then we will
have also sent a copy to the emergency/alternate contact at some
point.
So, I would like your opinions on how you think we should deal with
this. Two proposals I can think of are:
a) After at least 21 days of sending email alerts to the main
contact and the emergency contact and receiving no response, a
firewall rule will be added to block the problematic service and
an invoice will be raised for a managed firewall service, which
will be a monthly recurring charge. This will be quite expensive.
Or:
b) After at least 21 days of sending email alerts to the main
contact and the emergency contact and receiving no response, the
VPS's networking will be suspended. Networking will be re-enabled
when contact is re-established and a plan for securing the
problem service is agreed by both BitFolk and the customer.
I have already broached this question on IRC and basically no one
was in favour of (a) because they did not feel that surprise
invoices would go down well.
If you have other suggestions for how it should be handled I would
be happy to read and consider them. Ideas that involve either not
dealing with the problematic services or that aren't suitable for
automation are not likely to be acceptable though.
Cheers,
Andy
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https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
No doubt because of the surge in price of Bitcoin recently, I've had
a few queries about how to pay more than the value of an existing
outstanding invoice by Bitcoin.
With more usual payment methods like PayPal or bank transfers it is
simple to just send us an arbitrary amount of money. If you have
outstanding invoices then they get paid, and any left over goes to
account credit.
The same is not true of Bitcoins because at the moment we can't hold
account credit in Bitcoins. It would be technically possible of
course, but I do not want BitFolk to be an entity that holds funds
in Bitcoins, for a variety of security and regulatory reasons. That
means that we can only process Bitcoins by immediately turning them
into British Pounds (GBP).
Our Bitcoin payment system presents a payment request for the exact
Bitcoin equivalent that we're prepared to accept at that point in
time. We do not recommend manually editing the payment request in
order to pay more as the chance of a typo causing you to send it all
to the wrong address is high.
If you do want to pre-pay an amount in Bitcoins though, all is not
lost. Please contact support stating roughly how much you'd like to
pay. We'll create an invoice (in GBP) that roughly matches that
amount. When you pay it the GBP sum will go on your account as
credit.
This may be useful if you have some Bitcoins burning a hole in your
virtual wallet and want an easy way to cash out, since many virtual
currency marketplaces want lots of personal information about you,
and/or are risky.
This pre-payment issue was actually considered already and put in
the Bitcoin payments FAQ¹ almost 3 years ago, but I am not surprised
that it is not known about.
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Bitcoin#Can_I_preload_my_BitFolk_account_usi…
(or https://is.gd/7Z5JXv)
Please note that:
1) There is going to be a limit to the acceptable amount of such a
transaction, as our Bitcoin payment processor would still be left
holding that amount of Bitcoins and exposing themselves to risk.
A very large transaction would also bring Know Your Customer /
Anti-Money Laundering concerns. In the context of how much
BitFolk's services cost I wouldn't expect that to be an issue and
we will deal with it on a case by case basis.
2) These prepayments will not be refundable. We are not a virtual
currency exchange. You would be buying a voucher for use of
BitFolk's services. So no paying hundreds of GBP worth of Bitcoin
and then immediately asking for it back as GBP. :)
Cheers,
Andy
¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Bitcoin#Can_I_preload_my_BitFolk_account_usi…
or https://is.gd/7Z5JXv
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Hi,
I have signed up for the Bitfolk backup service and have to admit I didn't
spend too much time thinking what I should back up.
I'm interested in a survey of what people choose.
Personally I've got:
/home/ - because it obviously has files I want there
/etc/ - because there are config files in there I don't want to have to
recreate
/root/ - similar to /home, although I could probably move that
/srv/ - this is from when I migrated from a previous provider and I haven't
moved it elsewhere.
/var/ - I think this is probably the cause of the problem. I initially
thought /var/log would be useful and things like that. Do I need all of
/var? Probably not.
Is there anything obvious I've missed? Do many people just do /?
Thanks,
Paul
Just want to say thank you to Andy for taking care of our interest
throughout the year and to say hello to all the former HantsLUG guys
and gals who are still around, quite a few using bitfolk.
--
John Lewis
Debian & the GeneWeb genealogical data server
Hello,
The documentation for BitFolk's backups service was really in need
of an update so I rewrote it and moved it to the wiki here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups
If you use other services to backup your VPS then please feel free
to add them to the section at the end:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Backups#Alternative_backup_strategies
If you do something more than "just use Foo service" to backup your
VPS and feel like writing up a separate article then linking to it
from there would also be welcome.
Cheers,
Andy
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