Hello,
faustino.bitfolk.com has a hard disk on its way to death and so I
will be replacing it tomorrow sometime between 17:30 and 18:30.
Rebuild will take a few hours after that.
I'm not expecting there to be any down time or disruption.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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announce mailing list
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Hi,
Is anyone going to FOSDEM this year?
http://fosdem.org/2011/
I've just booked my tickets so perhaps I'll see you there?
Regards,
@ndy
--
andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0x7EBA75FF
I'm also on Faustino and experienced the same thing, websites and
mailserver completely down. Things seem to be back to normal now though.
-----Original Message-----
From: users-request(a)lists.bitfolk.com
Reply-to: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
Subject: users Digest, Vol 27, Issue 3
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:48:52 +0000
Seems as though it could be happening again. My other VPS (mailserver)
on
faustino is now unreachable. Can't even ping it
Keith
Hello,
Between about 23:39 and 23:46Z last night, 3rd January, multiple
servers became unreachable or suffered extremely poor networking
performance.
Servers particularly affected were:
barbar
kahlua
obstler
urquell
But all networking was affected to some extent, if only through
increased latency.
It appears to have been a denial of service attack of around
350Mbps / 250Kpps. Source IPs were spoofed and multiple destination
IPs were targeted.
I am continuing to work with our upstream network provider on this.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
You dont have to be illiterate to use the Internet, but it help's.
-- Mike Bristow
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Hi,
Intermittently between approximately 16:00 and 21:00Z today (2nd
Jan), a host which runs one of BitFolk's caching DNS resolvers
(212.13.194.71) was overloaded, causing poor performance for many of
you.
The cause was recent changes in the data transfer monitoring
scripts as previously discussed and detailed in:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/15
It seems that the more heavyweight method of estimating data
transfer is in some cases slow enough to still be running when the
next scheduled invocation of the script runs, causing both to run
slower, and the problem to spiral.
Since no hosts or critical services were actually reported down, we
weren't made aware of the issue as quickly as might have been
desired.
I have now made some modifications:
- It's now not possible for multiple copies of these scripts to run
at once.
- If system load is too high then the expensive checks will now be
skipped entirely.
There is also the fact that this host is simply doing too much - it
shouldn't be running these scripts in addition to being a resolver.
In the next few days I will be provisioning an additional resolver
and eventually this one will be retired.
Apologies for any disruption this may have caused for you.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi,
There's been a request for a read-only announcements list for
BitFolk, so I have decided to try this out.
I've created the "announce" list:
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
In future any sort of announcement that I would normally send to the
"users" list will instead be directed to "announce", and
automatically copied to the "users" list.
The "announce" list will not accept any discussion, and posts
sent through it will have Reply-To set to the "users" list.
Therefore if you're happy with the content and level of traffic on
the "users" list you need not do anything, as all announcements will
continue to end up there.
If on the other hand you would prefer to only see announcements from
BitFolk and not any user issues, following comments or debate, you
may wish to subscribe to "announce" and remove yourself from
"users".
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hello,
As customers who use a larger amount of bandwidth will be aware, the
predictive data transfer warnings we offer have had a tendency to
rapidly cycle between "warning" and "recovery" state just after the
reporting period starts.
This was reported here:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/15
I'm happy to report that I believe this issue is now fixed.
As a reminder you can manage your data transfer warning settings
here:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/xfer/
including switching between predictive or "percentage used"
warnings, or disabling warnings entirely.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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Hi guys,
I am planning to resell hosting accounts on my VPS to businesses as part of
a web design and programming job that I do now. However, I appear to be
having some problems with bind9, and setting up my own nameservers. I
originally thought that a domain translates to an IP and that was the end of
it.
This is what I know so far:
-I need 2 subdomains, ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com
This is what I have no idea about:
-Do these subdomains have to be on different servers, or just different
IP's? Can they even use the same IP?
-If they need to be different, can my hosting server be on 1.2.3.4 if my
nameservers are: 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8
I have followed this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/dns-configuration.html in order
to set up my first nameserver, and it will now ping example.com if I set the
resolv.conf to use itself.
If I set turasmara.com to use that nameserver, and ping it from my home box
I do not get anything. However if I ping it from the VPS I get:
root@hostinghaven:~# ping turasmara.com
PING turasmara.com (1.2.3.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.domainname.com (1.2.3.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.018 ms
What have I done wrong...and what do I till need to do to get this to work?
Thank you,
Daniel
Hello,
I've just been looking at the CentOS network install. It works great
apart from one thing: anaconda/disk druid refuse to install directly
onto a disk device without a partition table. There appears to be no
way to work around this.
It's been a common theme with the Debian and Ubuntu installers and
with various other tools that they get a bit freaked out by the idea
of a filesystem directly on a block device, but in those cases there
have been workarounds.
So, what is so bad about having a partition table?
Well, assume that the customer has /dev/xvda with a filesystem
directly on it, no partition table, and they want to grow that. The
process is as follows:
1. We enlarge their volume on the host.
2. Some time later the customer shuts down and boot their VPS again
to see the larger /dev/xvda.
3. Customer then does resize2fs /dev/xvda to online grow their root
filesystem into the new space.
You have to admire the simplicity of this; it's pretty hard to get a
shut down / boot wrong, and then you just type "resize2fs" with no
parameters and it's done.
What a shame that's it's unsupported by every major Linux
distribution's installer.
Assume instead that the customer has a partitioned /dev/xvda with
xvda1 as / and xvda2 as a swap partition. Now the process is more
like:
1. We enlarge their volume on the host
2. Some time later the customer shuts down and boot their VPS again
to see the larger /dev/xvda.
3. Customer can't just enlarge xvda1 because the swap partition
xvda2 is in the middle. So, delete that.
4. Edit partition table to delete xvda1 and recreate it again
larger. Note that it fails to tell the OS about the new partition
layout because it's in use.
5. Reboot again to see the larger xvda1 device.
6. Online resize of xvda1 with resize2fs.
7. Recreate swap (or use swapfile).
You can see that the second process is much more complicated than
the first. Not only that but it contains a number of terrifying
steps such as step 4 where the partition for the root filesystem is
deleted. I shudder at the thought of inexperienced sysadmins doing
things like this. I don't like doing it myself.
Disk resizing is quite a common operation at BitFolk. It's a lot
more common than reinstalling. The first process (without partition
table) has been done by customers around 100 times according to my
records, and has never gone wrong that I know of.
So, another possible approach: every VPS is set up with LVM from the
start. xvda partitioned, small / (containing /boot) on xvda1, rest
of disk as xvda2 and used for LVM physical volume, broken up into
small logical volumes for /usr, /var, /home and swap. If more space
is needed it comes as xvdb, xvdc, xvd.., which the customer adds to
their PV and puts in LVM.
Advantages
- The most flexibility for future growth.
- Works in all major distribution installers.
Disadvantages
- I expect very few customers know how to drive LVM, and I don't
really want to be in the business of selling or giving away LVM
training.
- Makes it a bit harder for me to poke around in a customer's VPS
install from outside, which is sometimes requested. e.g. if it
becomes compromised.
Something between the last proposal and the one before it:
Strongly suggest that people who partition their disks (through
choice or because they want to use an installer that gives no choice
like the CentOS one) use LVM, but set up VPSes ourselves directly on
the block devices.
At least then the CentOS installer is usable. In the CentOS case
this could actually be enforced by using a kickstart recipe to
automatically partition the disk in some suggested way, although
this does rather take away some of the point of using an installer
(flexibility).
Anyone have any thoughts? Any tricks I've missed here?
Constraints imposed by Xen: First device (xvda or xvda1) must be
ext3, and must contain /boot.
Cheers,
Andy
--
>> I have just recently purchased a Feathercraft Big Kahuna kayak
> does it have a heater?
Of course not. Everyone knows you can't have your kayak and heat it.
-- James Fidell
