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1117 discussions

Debian wheezy (testing) and Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04) now available for self-install

by Andy Smith

Hi, We've now tested and made available: - Debian wheezy (testing) - Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04) for self-install: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer If trying out Debian wheezy please do bear in mind that as the current testing distribution it is still under development and may thus be broken and/or uninstallable at any particular time. Whilst we will most likely be unable to help, we'd still like to hear of any problems you have using or installing wheezy. Those considering an upgrade from Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04.x LTS) to Maverick Meerkat (10.10) or Natty Narwhal (11.04) should remember that vendor security support for these latter two releases ends in April/October 2012 respectively. If you don't intend to upgrade your OS before then, you may wish to remain on the LTS release which is supported until April 2015. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

13 years, 7 months

Updating CentOS kernel

by Mike Zanker

Hi all, now that CentOS 5.6 has finally been released I've just run a "yum update" to install it. Despite installing the latest kernel (kernel-xen-2.6.18-238.5.1.el5) it's not actually booting with it (despite a shutdown and console boot). I guess I need to do something outside of the VPS (pyGrub?) to get this working but I don't know what. Can anybody advise, please? Thanks, Mike

13 years, 8 months

Debian Lenny crashes

by Adam Sweet

Hi everyone My VPS running Debian Lenny has recently started to crash frequently, about 6 times in the last week. I've had out of memory conditions in the past, though reasonably infrequently, so that was my first I thought. I've bumped my RAM allocation, added extra swap and removed a few services which weren't strictly necessary but the crashing continues. My resource graphs don't suggest any memory usage build up before the crash or anything else untoward going on and the system logs report nothing, it seems to just go more or less instantaneously. I managed to capture some of the console output when I got to the machine: http://pastebin.com/TjZRCebQ But it had been dead for about 6 hours as I'd been out for the evening, so it's possible the crucial part was lost before I got to it. I'm not much of an expert on interpreting kernel panics so I thought I'd ask if anybody has any greater insight on the cause or how I can capture the output to disk. At this point, my only options seem to be to migrate services off to another system until the system stops crashing, or add more RAM, or start afresh on a new VPS to see if it goes away. Regards, Adam Sweet -- http://blog.adamsweet.org/

13 years, 8 months

Unexpected power cycle of barbar.bitfolk.com

by Andy Smith

Hi, At approximately 0442Z today, 2011-04-05, I was alerted that several VPSes on barbar.bitfolk.com were not responding. On investigation, the host itself was displaying kernel errors related to Xen, and was also unresponsive. At this point I decided to power cycle it. When it came back up several of its RAID devices would not mount. It looked like this was just because of the power cycle; a write had managed to hit one of the disks but not any of the others, and a mount could be forced. I didn't want to rush into anything though due to the possibility of data loss. After some further investigation, I was able to find a way to sync the arrays and mount cleanly, and boot progressed. As of approximately 0521Z VPSes have been starting up again on barbar and this has just completed. I am not seeing any problems at the moment, though there is high disk contention due to many VPSes trying to fsck at once and a background verify of RAID integrity taking place. barbar had previously been up for nearly 2 years so many VPSes on it require fsck. For now we'll be keeping a close eye on the server and later today will investigate further. Please accept my apologies for the disruption. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

13 years, 8 months

Monitoring for zone transfers

by Andy Smith

Hello, As you may be aware, BitFolk offers free authoritative DNS services to VPS customers. This is provided by means of the BitFolk DNS servers taking a zone transfer (AXFR) from the customer's name server. As part of this service we monitor the customer's name server as a matter of course. That's because it saves everyone's time to know where any problems lie. What we currently monitor: - Customer's server responds on TCP/53 - Query of server for SOA record of the customer's domain produces a positive, authoritative response That's pretty good but it misses one class of misconfiguration: where a customer's name server is misconfigured to refuse zone transfer from BitFolk's servers. That's pretty obvious the first time the zone slaving is set up, but if it happens afterwards then it relies on customers spotting anomalies in their log files. If it isn't fixed, then once the "expire" setting of the SOA record is reached (generally 1-2 weeks for most domains) our name servers will no longer respond to queries for the customer's domain. This may come as a shock to the customer. At this point alerts will start firing for us and we'll probably have to open a ticket. I would really rather not have to open a ticket either when I spot the refused AXFRs in my logs, or when I start getting alerts. I would rather the customer got alerts as soon as AXFRs start failing. The problem is I can't think of a way to check that AXFR works without doing an AXFR. :) Can anyone else? Alternatively, if BitFolk's Nagios tried an AXFR say once a day for each of your zones would you consider that excessive? Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting "I am the permanent milk monitor of all hobbies!" -- Simon Quinlank

13 years, 8 months

Re: [bitfolk] Individual snapshot disk usage report added to panel/backups

by Deanna Earley

I found the same a while ago on mine. It reduced a many GB hourly diff to a few MB which including the snapshot was ~1/5 the size. -- Deanna Earley ----- Reply message ----- From: "Adam Spiers" <bitfolk(a)adamspiers.org> Date: Thu, Mar 24, 2011 12:02 Subject: [bitfolk] Individual snapshot disk usage report added to panel/backups To: "Andy Smith" <andy(a)bitfolk.com> Cc: <users(a)lists.bitfolk.com> On 24 March 2011 11:38, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote: > Hi Adam, > > On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 11:26:53AM +0000, Adam Spiers wrote: >> This is great - thanks! However I'm struggling to understand the >> numbers shown. On my VPS I see hourly snapshots consuming 2.5GB - >> what does this mean exactly? Presumably not that my VPS is churning >> that much data per hour, because it should be idle most of the time >> AFAIK. > > You refer to the differential report, so there are ~2.5GiB of diffs > per snapshot. Since the per-snapshot report shows each snapshot > coming in at ~9.5GiB that means you have the same amount of files > but with ~2.5GiB changing content every time. Wow, OK - something's not right for sure, as there shouldn't be anywhere near that much churn on my VPS. > Bear in mind that any time a file changes (even if it's just > metadata), a copy of both the old and new version will be stored in > their entirety. By metadata presumably you mean inode updates? So I can search for churn via find -ctime? In that case, could I expect remounting partitions with the noatime or relatime options to drastically reduce the size of incrementals? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atime_(Unix)#ctime http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/ > I can have a look and see what I can make of it if you like. I'd > rather not look at customer data without permission. > > If you want to look yourself, look for files that change metadata > (mtime, ownership) all the time, like if they're being checked out > of version control or downloaded from somewhere without preserving > mtimes. Something like that. Ahah. I think I may have located the culprits: huge log files. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 67797975 Mar 24 11:47 /home/adam/web/adamspiers.org/logs/error.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 141526573 Mar 24 11:55 /var/www/redmine/log/mod_rails/error.log -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 314066833 Mar 24 11:55 /var/www/redmine/log/production.log -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 895519982 Mar 24 11:49 /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/debug.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 899657028 Mar 24 11:56 /home/adam/web/adamspiers.org/logs/access.log If I start rotating these regularly, then I could expect the incrementals to significantly shrink, right? For the benefit of anyone else who wishes to sanity check their churn, I did something like this: backup_dirs="/boot /etc /home /initrd /root /srv /usr/local /var" find $backup_dirs -ctime -2 >& /tmp/find_-ctime_-2.out xargs ls -ld < /tmp/find_-ctime_-2.out | sort -n -k5 If there's a better way then please do share it. _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

13 years, 9 months

Individual snapshot disk usage report added to panel/backups

by Andy Smith

Hi, We've added a report of each snapshot's disk usage to: https://panel.bitfolk.com/backups/ This will make it easier for you to spot which snapshot introduced lots of files, for example. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

13 years, 9 months

Ubuntu 10.04 Logwatch

by Robert Gauld

Hi folks I'm after either some signposting to a more appropriate place to ask or a solution. The problem I have is that I'm trying to setup logwatch to monitor a log file for a script I've written and am having no joy whatsoever. Here's the steps I've taken and content, ownership and permissions of relevant files (ask if I've missed something useful). 1. Setup script to log to /var/log/ssh-validate 2. Create script to process logfile (/etc/logwatch/scripts/services/ssh-validate) 3. Create logfile definition (/etc/logwatch/logfiles/ssh-validate) 4. Create service definition (/etc/logwatch/services/ssh-validate.conf) File /etc/logwatch/scripts/services/ssh-validate root:root -rwxr-xr-x Perl script, reads from STDIN, outputs to STDOUT, works from command line (using cat /var/log/ssh-validate | ./ssh-validate) File /etc/logwatch/logfiles/ssh-validate root:root -rw-r--r-- LogFile = ssh-validate Archive = ssh-validate.*.gz File /etc/logwatch/services/ssh-validate.conf root:root -rw-r--r-- Title = ssh-validate LogFile = ssh-validate -- Robert Gauld http://www.robertgauld.co.uk

13 years, 9 months

Clarification regarding "reinstall on system compromise" has been added to Terms and Conditions

by Andy Smith

Hello, A clarification has today been added to BitFolk's Terms and Conditions: http://bitfolk.com/policy/terms.html * BitFolk reserves the right to require that The Customer perform a reinstall of The Service if at any time BitFolk believes that The Service has been seriously compromised. Whether the compromise is serious enough to require reinstall will be at BitFolk's sole discretion. I refer to this as a clarification because it has always been the case that BitFolk has required reinstallation of seriously compromised VPSes. This has previously been enforced under the "block or terminate service at any time for any reason" clause, but it was suggested that it would be preferable to explicitly list it, and I agree with that suggestion. I hope you will agree in any case that responsible systems administration practice is to reinstall when a root-level compromise is discovered or strongly suspected. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

13 years, 9 months

Problems with the authoritative nameservers and names with \032 in them

by Andy Smith

Hello, It was brought to my attention earlier today that a zone file correctly loaded into a customer's BIND nameserver and transferred to BitFolk's servers was not being served correctly by two of the servers. On further investigation it seems that there's some bug in PowerDNS regarding DNS names (the bit on the left hand side) with "\032" in them. Last year I fixed a bug in the sqlite backend of PowerDNS regarding incorrect escaping of "\", which had prevented "\032" and anything else with "\" in it being stored correctly as DNS content (the right hand side). I'm not yet sure if this is related or more fundamental. I've reported the bug. At the moment the impact is that if you have a DNS zone with something like this in it: foo\032bar._http._tcp SRV 0 0 10 baz.example.com. then it will get stored in b.authns.bitfolk.com and c.authns.bitfolk.com as: foo bar._http._tcp SRV 0 0 10 baz.example.com. This is incorrect. BIND servers taking the same AXFR would store "foo\032bar._http._tcp". Anything correctly querying for "foo\032bar._http._tcp" will not get answers from the affected servers. Therefore for the moment if you have zones that use these types of record on the left hand side, you should not delegate them to {b,c}.authns.bitfolk.com. "\032" on the right hand side is okay. If you use PowerDNS yourselves I'd be interested to know if you can replicate this with backends other than gsqlite (e.g. gmysql or gpsql), as this would indicate whether it's a problem with the gsqlite backend or something else. FWIW this type of DNS name seems to be used for DNS-based service discovery: http://www.dns-sd.org/ Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce

13 years, 9 months

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