[And now with some copy-paste errors fixed]
Hi,
On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 01:32:17AM +0000, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users wrote:
> So, if you do actually engage in online chat for any projects or
> communities please would you fill in this short questionnaire to let
> us know about it?
>
> https://forms.gle/cYyP2QFZzpDWdJ9T6
Responses seem to have stopped now, so here's a summary.
There were 35 responses - thanks!
## Prefer
1. IRC: 15
2. Telegram: 9
3. Discord: …
[View More] 7
4. Matrix: 4
5. Slack: 3
6. Mattermost: 1
## It's OK
1. Slack: 16
2. IRC: 14
2. Telegram: 14
3. Discord: 11
4. Matrix: 9
5. Mattermost: 3
## Dislike
1. Discord: 15
2. Slack: 14
3. Matrix: 6
4. IRC: 5
5. Telegram: 4
6. Mattermost: 2
## Never used
1. Mattermost: 29
2. Matrix: 16
3. Telegram: 8
4. Discord: 2
4. Slack: 2
5. IRC: 1
Looking for the positives, if I award 1 point for "prefer" and half
a point for "it's ok" then:
## Arbitrary scores
1. IRC: 22
2. Telegram: 16
3. Discord: 12½
4. Slack: 11
5. Matrix: 8½
6. Mattermost: 2½
However, opinions seem quite polarised about some. e.g. if we also
deduct a point for "Dislike" then:
## Arbitrary scores including haters
1. IRC: 17
2. Telegram: 12
3. Matrix: 2½
4. Mattermost: ½
5. Discord: -2½
6. Slack: -3
I will take a little time to consider these results.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
This mail is about BitFolk's customer chat which is currently the
IRC channel #BitFolk on Libera, and maybe expanding it to other
chat platforms. If that doesn't interest you then you can safely
just ignore this email.
I realised recently that despite there being around 45 actual people
present in BitFolk's customer chat, for a while now it's been
basically silent.
I'm prepared to accept that it's become an idle zone, but if it's
the case that people are chatting elsewhere then I'd …
[View More]consider going
where the users are before giving up on it.
So, if you do actually engage in online chat for any projects or
communities please would you fill in this short questionnaire to let
us know about it?
https://forms.gle/cYyP2QFZzpDWdJ9T6
I've intentionally made it so that it doesn't capture any personal
details and requires no sign-in, so please don't abuse it by
submitting it multiple times. 😀 If it still bothers you that it's a
Google property then you can just email me your thoughts off-list.
I'm not planning to close down the IRC channel as I expect the
people who idle there do so just so that they can ask what is up if
they ever need to. There isn't any actual chat there though, and I
don't see that changing now.
I'm also not promising to set something up on whichever platform
comes out top (this is not a vote!). It would be very interesting to
me to find out where people are, though.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
Rather than burning tons of NVMe storage on my Mastodon cache I
thought I'd give bcachefs a go. It was upstreamed into the Linux 6.7
kernel in early January.
Seems to work.
$ uname -a
Linux social0 6.7-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.7.4-1~exp1 (2024-02-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ sudo bcachefs format \
--label=ssd.ssd1 /dev/xvdd \
--label=hdd.hdd1 /dev/xvde \
--foreground_target=ssd \
--promote_target=ssd \
--background_target=hdd
$ sudo mount -t bcachefs /dev/xvdd:/…
[View More]dev/xvde /mnt/cache
$ sudo rsync -SHav /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache/ /mnt/cache/
$ sudo umount /mnt/cache
$ sudo mv /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache{,.old}
$ sudo mkdir /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
$ sudo mount -t bcachefs /dev/xvdd:/dev/xvde /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
$ df -h /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvdd:/dev/xvde 468G 61G 400G 14% /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
xvdd is a 10GiB NVMe while xvde is a 500GiB HDD. It promotes stuff
to xvdd on read.
The kernel comes from Debian experimental. The only other things
that are needed are:
- about 140MiB of packaged dependencies
- a recent Rust compiler
- building bcachefs-tools from source (just "make; make install"
once you did the above two)
Of course, it may yet all end in tears.
No version of grub understands bcachefs yet so you wouldn't be able
to boot off of it.
https://bcachefs-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
I've reconfigured our apt-cacher to use HTTPS for communications
with deb.debian.org since that is known to work well. So, all use of
deb.debian.org through our apt-cacher will use HTTPS between BitFolk
and deb.debian.org. You don't need to (and can't) change anything on
your end.
If you know of other in-use mirror sites that are reliable on HTTPS
then I'm happy to switch them over too. Reply here or send a support
ticket please.
More info: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Apt-cacher…
[View More]Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
Since BitFolk moved datacentre from Telehouse to IP House, and since
some customers had previously actually asked about a renewable
energy statement, I've just updated it.
TL;DR: it's 59% now and they aim for it to be 100% by February 2025.
More detail:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Renewable_energy_statement
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Between approximately 23:07Z and 23:14Z today, due to an error in
some work our colo provider was undertaking, two servers suffered
a total network outage and our remaining servers a partial outage.
Apologies for the disruption. It is not expected to re-occur.
The two worst affected servers were "clockwork" and "macallan".
Our servers have a pair of public network interfaces and are
connected to two separate switches. The error took out one of the
switches but left our ports enabled there,…
[View More] so it was a blackhole for
such traffic.
At the moment we use network bonding in active-backup mode. This
didn't fail over because the link state didn't go down, so the two
servers that had the misconfigured switch as their "active"
interface experienced the longer outage.
We are in the middle of transitioning away from a bonded setup and
having separate interfaces do BGP with our colo provider and use BGP
for such redundancy. We are already doing the BGP part but have yet
to disable the bonding and split the interfaces back out. When that
is complete — which I would hope to have done in a timescale of
weeks, not months — this failure mode won't exist.
Apologies again,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
Any bitfolkers off to FOSDEM in Brussels this February?
I'm going to be there Friday 2nd leaving late afternoon on Sunday
4th.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Dear customers,
== TL;DR
- Our colo provider is moving out of Telehouse to another datacentre close by,
and we are going to be moving with them.
- It will mean one short (2h or less) outage for each of your VMs as our
servers are physically moved on multiple dates (to be decided) in
December and January.
- Nothing about your service will change. IPs, specs, prices will all remain
the same. Our colo provider will retain the same transit providers and will
still peer at LINX.
== …
[View More]Background
Since we started in 2006 BitFolk has been hosted with the same colo provider in
the same datacentre: Telehouse London. Telehouse have decided to not renew our
colo provider's contract with them and so they will be moving almost all of
their infrastructure to another datacentre; the nearby IP House.
https://www.ip-house.co.uk/
Given that we have much less than a single rack of infrastructure ourselves,
our options here are to either move with our current colo provider or find
another colo provider. Staying exactly where we are is not an available option.
In light of the good relationship we have had with our colo provider since
2006, we have decided to move with them. This must take place before the middle
of January 2024.
== Planning
At this early stage only broad decisions have been made. The main reason I'm
writing at this time is to give you as much notice as possible of the
relatively short outage you will experience in December or January. As soon as
more detailed plans are made I will communicate them to you.
As soon as the infrastructure is available at IP House we plan to move some of
our servers there - ones with no customer services on them. We will schedule
the physical movements of our servers that have customers VMs on them across
multiple dates in December and January. As IP House is only about 500 metres
from Telehouse, we don't expect an outage of more than about 2 hours for each
server that is moved.
If you can not tolerate an outage like that, please open a support ticket by
emailing support(a)bitfolk.com as soon as possible. We will do our best to
schedule a live migration of your service from hardware in Telehouse to
hardware in IP House, resulting in only a few seconds of unreachability. You
can contact us about that now, or you can wait until the exact date of your
move is communicated to you, but there are a limited number of customers we can
do this for. So please only ask for this if it's really important to you. If it
is, please ask for it as soon as you can to avoid disappointment.
== Answers To Anticipated Questions
=== Will anything about my service change?
No. It will be on the same hardware, with the same IP addresses and
same specification for the same price.
We're aware that we're well overdue for a hardware refresh and we hope to be
tackling that as soon as the move is done. That will result in a higher
specification for the same price.
=== Will the network connectivity change?
No. Our colo provider will retain the same mix of transit providers that it
currently does, and it will still peer at LINX.
=== When exactly will outages affect me?
We have not yet planned exactly when we will move our servers. As soon as we do
we'll contact all affected customers. We need to co-ordinate work with our colo
provider who are also busy planning the movement of all of their infrastructure
and other customers, and installing new infrastructure at IP House.
We expect there to be several dates with one or more servers moving on each
date. All customers on those servers wil experience a short outage, but in
total we would expect only the one outage per VM.
=== Will I be able to change the date/time of my outage?
No. As the whole server that your VM is on will be moving at the specified
time, your options will be to either go with that or seek to have your service
live migrated ahead of that date. Please contact support if you want one or
more of your VMs to be live migrated.
If you have multiple VMs on different servers it is possible that they will be
affected at the same time, i.e. if the two servers that your VMs are on are
both to be relocated in the same maintenance window. If that is undesirable,
again one or all of your VMs will need to be live migrated to servers already
present in IP House.
=== What is live migration?
It's where we snapshot your running VM and its storage, ship the data across to
a new host and resume execution again. It typically results in only a few
seconds of unreachability, and probably TCP connections still stay alive.
More information: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore
== Thanks
Thanks for your custom. Despite the upheaval I am looking forward to
a new chapter in a new datacentre!
Andy Smith
Director
BitFolk Ltd
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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