24 Jan
2011
24 Jan
'11
11:39 p.m.
Hi,
You may recall recently that there was a period of poor network
performance because the customer DNS resolver on 212.13.194.71 was
overloaded:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20110102.221800.b90128dc.en.html
In that thread I promised to provision a new dedicated resolver to
avoid a re-occurrence of the issue.
Instead I took the opportunity to provision several new resolver
hosts in a cluster with fail over for the service IPs.
All customers should change their resolvers from:
212.13.194.71
212.13.194.96
to:
85.119.80.232
85.119.80.233
There's some maintenance coming up in February (details in a
separate email, shortly) which will take 212.13.194.71 offline for
several hours. It's therefore important that you change to using the
new resolvers before this time, otherwise you will experience severe
network performance problems.
If you have any questions please direct to users list or
support(a)bitfolk.com.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
9 Feb
9 Feb
6 p.m.
Hello,
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 11:39:15PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
All customers should change their resolvers from:
212.13.194.71
212.13.194.96
to:
85.119.80.232
85.119.80.233
There's some maintenance coming up in February (details in a
separate email, shortly) which will take 212.13.194.71 offline for
several hours. It's therefore important that you change to using the
new resolvers before this time, otherwise you will experience severe
network performance problems.
There's still lots of customers using the legacy resolvers
212.13.194.71 and 212.13.194.96, so I'm going to decommission them a
day before the maintenance that would take 212.13.194.71 offline.
That is, I'm turning them off on the afternoon of Friday 25th
February.
The purpose of this is so that anyone who didn't get the message
will try to contact support on Friday afternoon when I'm otherwise
unoccupied as opposed to on the day of the maintenance when I am
busy dealing with that.
The original email:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20110124.233915.2c058600.en.html
Details of the upcoming maintenance:
http://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20110124.235657.c7ba9bcf.en.html
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
7:03 p.m.
On Wed, February 9, 2011 6:00 pm, Andy Smith wrote:
There's still lots of customers using the legacy
resolvers
212.13.194.71 and 212.13.194.96, so I'm going to decommission them a
day before the maintenance that would take 212.13.194.71 offline.
Could you contact those customers that haven't reconfigured to advise them
direct? Perhaps you could reconfigure it for them?
(There's probably a whole bunch of reasons/issues that I haven't
considered but speaking as a customer I'd be very happy for you to make
these adjustments on my behalf if for whatever reason I'd missed the
announcement of impending changes)
Mathew
7:08 p.m.
Hi Mathew,
I think the reason Bitfolk doesn't do these changes is because it's
unmanaged hosting, which means that we are responsible for everything inside
the VPS itself.
Daniel
On 9 February 2011 11:03, Mathew Newton <bitfolklist(a)newtonnet.co.uk> wrote:
On Wed, February 9, 2011 6:00 pm, Andy Smith wrote:
There's still lots of customers using the
legacy resolvers
212.13.194.71 and 212.13.194.96, so I'm going to decommission them a
day before the maintenance that would take 212.13.194.71 offline.
Could you contact those customers that haven't reconfigured to advise them
direct? Perhaps you could reconfigure it for them?
(There's probably a whole bunch of reasons/issues that I haven't
considered but speaking as a customer I'd be very happy for you to make
these adjustments on my behalf if for whatever reason I'd missed the
announcement of impending changes)
Mathew
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
7:21 p.m.
Hi Daniel,
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 11:08:39AM -0800, Daniel Case wrote:
I think the reason Bitfolk doesn't do these
changes is because it's
unmanaged hosting, which means that we are responsible for everything inside
the VPS itself.
In this case more specifically because it would involve:
- Contacting customer to agree what work will be done and when
- Maintaining / setting up my own login details on the VPS
- Connecting to VPS, carrying out change
- Testing it worked
- Confirming to customer that work was done
- The non-zero number of customers who will then blame us for every
problem encountered months or years following
none of which are really feasible to do for free across ~360 VPSes.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
8:38 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
...
- Connecting to VPS, carrying out change
- Testing it worked
...
Forgive me my inexperience, but Andy's comment about testing has me worried.
After I've made the change to /etc/resolv.conf, what should I be doing to
test the change? I've successfully pinged an outside site, is there
anything else?
Thanks,
Mike
9:04 p.m.
Hi,
> ...
> - Connecting to VPS, carrying out change
> - Testing it worked
> ...
>
>
> Forgive me my inexperience, but Andy's comment about testing has me
> worried. After I've made the change to /etc/resolv.conf, what should I
> be doing to test the change? I've successfully pinged an outside site,
> is there anything else?
That sounds like it should cover it. Try to ping a site that you know
definitely won't be cached anywhere. You can also use nslookup or dig if
you're interested in more technical details.
Regards,
@ndy
-- andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0x7EBA75FF
9:13 p.m.
On Wed, February 9, 2011 9:04 pm, Andy Bennett wrote:
Might any applications/services have cached the (old) /etc/resolv.conf
contents?
Mathew
After
I've made the change to /etc/resolv.conf, what should
I
That sounds like it should cover it. be doing to test the change? I've
successfully pinged an outside
site,
> is there anything else?
10:04 p.m.
Thanks all. I don't think anything that's running on my server would cache
resolv.conf, but I'll double check.
Thanks again,
Mike
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 4:13 PM, Mathew Newton
<bitfolklist(a)newtonnet.co.uk>wrote;wrote:
On Wed, February 9, 2011 9:04 pm, Andy Bennett wrote:
Might any applications/services have cached the (old) /etc/resolv.conf
contents?
Mathew
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
After
I've made the change to /etc/resolv.conf, what should
I
That sounds like it should cover it. be doing to test the change? I've
successfully pinged an outside
site,
> is there anything else? 
10 Feb
10 Feb
10:24 a.m.
I have in the past noticed that Apache tends to cache whatever is in
/etc/resolv.conf until the daemon is restarted. Apache might not
normally need to do DNS lookups but will routinely do so if you have
it set to reverse-resolve IPs for access.log stuff.
...I could be wrong but it probably wouldn't hurt to sighup apache /
httpd after you change resolv.conf ?
On 9 February 2011 22:04, Michael Corliss <michaeljcorliss(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks all. I don't think anything that's
running on my server would cache
resolv.conf, but I'll double check.
11:10 a.m.
Andy,
I also notice that my secondary DNS is hosted on .71 - should I change
this to one of the new IP addresses, or will I just be without the
secondary DNS during the downtime. The latter is ok for me.
Regards,
Andy
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
6:56 p.m.
Hi Andy,
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:10:45AM +0000, Andy Loughran wrote:
I also notice that my secondary DNS is hosted on .71
a.authns.bitfolk.com has address 212.13.194.70
(i.e. not 212.13.194.71).
It will be unaffected by the maintenance.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
9 Feb
9 Feb
9:47 p.m.
Hi Michael,
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 03:38:46PM -0500, Michael Corliss wrote:
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Andy Smith
<andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
Not really. If you can resolve things by name then it's working. It
should be pretty obviously working or not whenever you try to do
anything that resolves names.
BitFolk has a couple of customers who are on a different address
range to everyone else and I forgot to allow one of them to use the
resolver, and it's that sort of thing I'd be looking out for.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
...
- Connecting to VPS, carrying out change
- Testing it worked
...
Forgive me my inexperience, but Andy's comment about testing has me worried.
After I've made the change to /etc/resolv.conf, what should I be doing to
test the change? I've successfully pinged an outside site, is there
anything else? 
10 Feb
10 Feb
2:12 p.m.
On Wed, 9 Feb 2011 19:21:22 +0000, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
[snip]
- The non-zero number of customers who will then blame
us for every
problem encountered months or years following
That puts me in mind of *so* many support issues in the past.
My favourite I think was the man who insisted my Debian CD had given his
BIOS a virus.
John
5:48 p.m.
On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:12:29 +0000
John Winters <john(a)sinodun.org.uk> wrote:
On Wed, 9 Feb 2011 19:21:22 +0000, Andy Smith
<andy(a)bitfolk.com>
wrote: [snip]
That reminds me of some of the comments on the DistroWatch site with
people complaining that the Debian Squeeze release was too big a
download or that upgrading pulled in too many packages!
--
John Lewis
Debian & the GeneWeb genealogical data server
- The non-zero number of customers who will then
blame us for every
problem encountered months or years following
That puts me in mind of *so* many support issues in the past.
My favourite I think was the man who insisted my Debian CD had given
his BIOS a virus.
9 Feb
9 Feb
7:09 p.m.
Hi Mathew,
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 07:03:34PM -0000, Mathew Newton wrote:
On Wed, February 9, 2011 6:00 pm, Andy Smith wrote:
In my view they should be on the users or announce list otherwise
they will miss a lot of important announcements.
There's still lots of customers using the
legacy resolvers
212.13.194.71 and 212.13.194.96, so I'm going to decommission them a
day before the maintenance that would take 212.13.194.71 offline.
Could you contact those customers that haven't reconfigured to advise them
direct? Perhaps you could reconfigure it for them?
BitFolk's customers on the whole don't wish to pay £50+VAT/hr for
sysadmin consultancy.
If anyone reading does want to do that, for this particular simple
issue I'll charge half an hour; please contact support(a)bitfolk.com
as soon as possible.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
7:29 p.m.
On Wed, February 9, 2011 7:09 pm, Andy Smith wrote:
Indeed. Merely playing devil's advocate; one might argue that it's an
aspect of the service that you've changed however as I'm typing this I'm
wondering if this argument doesn't hold much water given that the
provision of DNS resolvers is not actually part of the purchased service!
(I'll post anyway as if this is the case it's is a point that would suffer
no harm being restated)
Perhaps you
could reconfigure it for them?
BitFolk's customers on the whole don't wish to pay £50+VAT/hr for
sysadmin consultancy. If anyone reading does want to do that, for this
particular simple
issue I'll charge half an hour
Bargain :-)
Mathew
25 Feb
25 Feb
12:23 p.m.
Hello,
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 06:00:06PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
There's still lots of customers using the legacy
resolvers
212.13.194.71 and 212.13.194.96, so I'm going to decommission them a
day before the maintenance that would take 212.13.194.71 offline.
That's now done, and I'm awaiting support tickets.. :)
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
13 Mar
13 Mar
8:36 a.m.
Hello,
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 06:00:06PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 11:39:15PM +0000, Andy Smith
wrote:
> All customers should change their resolvers from:
>
> 212.13.194.71
> 212.13.194.96
>
> to:
>
> 85.119.80.232
> 85.119.80.233
I was asked by multiple people if these could also be made available
over IPv6. That's now been done, so you can optionally add:
2001:ba8:1f1:f205::53
2001:ba8:1f1:f206::53
to your /etc/resolv.conf
There's absolutely no reason to do this unless you are some sort of
IPv6 puritan that wants as much of your traffic to go over IPv6 as
possible, even internally to BitFolk[1].
Whether you use the IPv6 resolver IPs makes no difference to whether
you can resolve IPv6 records or not.
Cheers,
Andy
[1] In which case maybe you want to go all the way and remove the
IPv4 addresses from your resolv.conf as well? Your call.
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
4965
days inactive
5013
days old
18 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
Andy Bennett -
Andy Loughran -
Andy Smith -
Daniel Case -
john lewis -
John Winters -
Mathew Newton -
Michael Corliss -
Philip Veale