I have a reasonable, if basic, understanding of DNS, i.e. the different
types of record, their functions and structure. I need to set up my own
nameserver on my vps to be the authoritative server for a domain which will
be hosted on my other bitfolk vps. I am running them on Lenny. Does anyone
know of a good guide on the web to doing this? I don't just want to go
through Google as I would trust your recommendations more.
Many thanks
Keith
--
Keith Williams
www.jogle2010.org.ukwww.westnorfolkrspca.org.uk
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're
going and hook up with them later.
- Mitch Hedberg
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark
to read.
- Groucho Marx
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
Hi, folks,
Any suggestions for a reliable monitoring service?
The people at Pingdom appear to spend all their time on their blog. At least half of the alerts I get from them are false positives - though not always as hilarious as this one.
Graham Freeman
(Sent from my handheld)
Begin forwarded message:
> From: alert(a)pingdom.com
> Date: 24 June 2010 19:57:06 PDT
> To: graham.freeman(a)cernio.com
> Subject: DOWN alert: Cernio VPS LON01 DNS (cernio.com) is DOWN
> Reply-To: alert(a)pingdom.com
>
>
> PingdomAlert DOWN:
> Cernio VPS LON01 DNS (cernio.com) is down since 1969-12-31 16:33:30.
Sheesh, Andy! 40 years of downtime!
:)
Graham Freeman
(Sent from my handheld)
Begin forwarded message:
> From: alert(a)pingdom.com
> Date: 24 June 2010 20:44:56 PDT
> To: graham.freeman(a)cernio.com
> Subject: UP alert: Cernio VPS LON01 DNS (cernio.com) is UP
> Reply-To: alert(a)pingdom.com
>
>
> PingdomAlert UP:
> Cernio VPS LON01 DNS (cernio.com) is UP again at 2010-06-24 19:13:26, after 354841h 40m of downtime.
And what use is that to the vast majority of people on this list? Don't you think its a bit rude advertising a competitors product on list?
Jon
Kai Hendry <hendry(a)webconverger.com> wrote:
>I honestly use bytemark's watchdog to monitor my bitfolk machine and others.
>
>http://www.bytemark.co.uk/support/technical_documents/watchdog?tags=Watchdog
>
>Easiest thing to use.
>
>_______________________________________________
>users mailing list
>users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
>https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
Hello,
In the past there have been a lot of good suggestions for things that the
BitFolk service should provide. I've mostly been keeping them in my
head, and occasionally in RT (support(a)bitfolk.com).
That's not very good, because (aside from my support helpers) I'm
the only one who gets to see them, I only get to talk about them
with the individual who suggested them, and having only my own
intuition to guide me it's hard to weigh up what should be worked on
first.
So, I've set up an issue tracker and put the ideas I'd recorded in
various other places into it. Please have a look:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/tracker
The credentials are your usual bitfolk ones.
If you have time I'd really appreciate if you could have a look
through and vote for the features that you personally want to see
implemented. Any additional comments or new issues you'd create
there I'd consider a bonus.
This particular piece of software is new to me and I've only been
running it for a few days so it's possible I might end up changing
it, but even if that happens the data will still be useful and can
be migrated.
Cheers,
Andy
--
"I just wanted to say to you by the way of introductory remarks that I'm
extremely miffed about today's events and in my quest to try to make you
understand the level of my unhappiness, I'm likely to use an awful lot of
what we would call violent sexual imagery and I just wanted to check that
neither of you would be terribly offended by that." -- Malcolm Tucker
Hello,
Telehouse have finished renovating TFM1 and now want the last few
rack tenants to move their racks at some point in the next 8 weeks
so they can finish off the last bits.
Our colo supplier is coordinating with Telehouse as to when this move will
take place, because the rack power will need to be switched off
while it happens. I don't know the exact date/time yet other than
"in the next 8 weeks" but I thought I would give you a heads up.
The only server in TFM1 currently is faustino.
I'll follow up again when I have more details. If the outage will be
short then I'm pushing for a week of notice.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
PS You may have seen me complain about the state of TFM1 during the
renovations. I visited yesterday and it's much nicer now, and I
would/will put machines back in there again.
Hello,
If you're on IRC, or follow me/bitfolk on twitter or on Facebook
you're probably bored to tears hearing about this, but just in case
there's some of you who aren't..
I've been investigating the issue of lack of entropy in virtual
machines recently, and have gone into it in some detail in the
following two blog postings:
http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2010/06/06/adventures-in-entropy-part-1/http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2010/06/07/adventures-in-entropy-part-2/
I now have a solution for serving high-quality entropy to BitFolk
virtual machines, so if you feel you don't have as much entropy as
you need then it would be great if you would try out using my (free)
entropy service.
You will need to install ekeyd-egd-linux or some other solution
which can use the egd protocol from a TCP socket and feed it into
your kernel. The entropy service is at 212.13.194.102 port 8888.
No warranties or guarantees as to the quality of the entropy are
made, use at your own risk, your causality may be at risk if you
misuse this entropy or any other pseudo-random algorithm secured
upon it, ...
Let me know how you get on or if you have any problems.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
>> 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
Hello,
If you don't make use of the BitFolk backup service then you might
want to skip this.
Those who have backups set up have dedicated some of their disk
space to the backups. The stuff they asked to be backed up is backed
up and multiple levels of snapshots are simulated using hardlinks.
Access is via read-only NFSv3.
I provide only read-only NFS access because:
a) I don't want people to be able to corrupt their backups; and
b) I don't want people using it for general purpose file storage
Unfortunately people do from time to time end up having things backed
up that they don't want backed up. Backing up a very large set of
files that were only temporarily needed, for example. Once the
content has been backed up once it can be difficult to get rid of
because the entire point of having multiple levels of snapshots is
that deleting the data won't delete it from all of the historical
snapshots. In many cases we are talking 6 months of storage here.
The problem comes when the amount of stuff backed up exceeds the
amount of disk space set aside for backups, and the customer wants
things removed from the backups in order to bring them back under
quota. This is at direct odds with my desire for them not to have
write access to their backups.
I also have a stronger desire to not have to poke about in people's
data, though. [1]
Unless anyone can think of any clever compromises, how about this?:
I'll delete entire snapshots for you on request.
If you back up MASSIVE_FILE and then a day later delete it,
its presence in snapshots might be like this:
/hourly.0 not present
/hourly.1 present
/hourly.2 present
.
.
/daily.0 present
/daily.1 not present
If I deleted every snapshot between hourly.1 and daily.0
inclusive then hourly.0 would become a delta to daily.1,
neither of which would include MASSIVE_FILE, thus greatly
reducing disk space usage.
This has the advantages that it means I don't have to poke about in
your files, since a whole snapshot can be treated as an opaque blob
of data for my purposes. It also could be automated reasonably
easily. The obvious downside is that it's a pretty blunt tool; if
the customer leaves MASSIVE_FILE being backed up for a long time
then potentially all their backups will need to be nuked.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Andy
[1] "hi support, I have accidentally backed up 42GiB of extreme
stoat porn onto your backup server, please can you go in and
delete anything that looks like that so my backups can work
again, thanks."
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Only one - who gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem
to an earlier joke.
I don't live in UK and I maybe want to stream BBC web streams over ssh.
It was illegal before the law (te-hee), but now, according to the law, "ISPs
that fail to apply technical measures against subscribers can be fined up to
£250,000".
So, what now? BitFolk will start to monitor traffic and when certain clients
try to access BBC web streams, then they will get very angry letter saying
that they have been naughty?
Or, I'm exaggerating?
Hi,
At approximately 0530Z, kahlua rebooted itself unexpectedly. All
VPSes on kahlua have now been restarted. If you're still seeing
problems and are unable to resolve them yourself via console then
please contact support. I am still investigating and will follow up
with more info.
It was only just under 2 months ago that kahlua locked up and had to
be power cycled. This wasn't the quite same, but it's possible there
is some hardware problem here. If anything like this re-occurs I
shall be swapping the disks into a spare server at possibly short
notice.
Please accept my apologies for the disruption.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
> The optimum programming team size is 1.
Has Jurassic Park taught us nothing?
-- pfilandr
