I suppose I was surprised that no-one has requested the ability to create and spin up a VPS via the panel. And then to change specification. And remove it again.

Hello, On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 09:00:14PM +0000, Gerald Davies wrote: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Using_the_self-serve_net_installer 1. Log in to the Xen Shell https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Xen_Shell 2. If your VPS is not already shut down, shut it down with the "shutdown" or "destroy" commands. 3. If currently 32-bit and wanting 64-bit, switch architecture with "arch x86_64" command. 4. Boot the standard OS text-mode installer with e.g. "install debian_stretch" 5. Normal installer boots and you can install a working copy of the OS pretty much by selecting the default option at every prompt, although it is suggested that you force it to place swap on xvdb disk (otherwise it puts it on xvda, and that wastes some of your space). For those familiar with the normal installer of their OS that takes no more than a couple of minutes. Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS are supported. This has been available for about 8 years. Do people not know about it? Should a link to it be put somewhere on the Panel? I realise it's not single click. I guess I can find a way to have an "install Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS" button that runs a non-interactive version of that and emails you when it's done, but the above is already there. Some people like to take their time to migrate stuff over to a new install. In that case, this might be of interest: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Migrating_to_a_new_VPS

If sending email out of a VPS, I would recommend *not* doing it by IPv6 unless you set your IPv6 reverse DNS. It's usually quite easy to tell the MTA to use a specific address to send out the email, so if I wasn't going to set the v6 reverse DNS I'd recommend setting the MTA to use only the single IPv4 address that has proper reverse DNS. But I would encourage anyone who wants to set their own v6 reverse DNS to at least give setting up their own DNS server a try. A customer who already did it wrote instructions in the wiki: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/IPv6#Reverse_DNS That boils down to: - apt install bind9 - write zone content somewhere like /var/lib/bind/4.0.0.f.1.f.1.0.8.a.b.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa - add zone declaration for "4.0.0.f.1.f.1.0.8.a.b.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa" to /etc/bind/named.conf.local - sudo systemctl reload bind9.service - watch the logs - test with local query: $ dig -x 2001:ba8:1f1:f004::2 @localhost - you could delegate the zone now, but you only have one nameserver. Better would be to contact support(a)bitfolk.com and ask for the zone to be mirrored on the BitFolk nameservers, so do that - when that's all working, go to the Panel and delegate the zone to your VPS and the three BitFolk nameservers, or just the BitFolk ones if you're wanting to do hidden master. That's it. It seems simpler than a lot of other things you've already done on your VPS.

Hello, On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 09:36:40PM +0000, admins wrote: If your goal is to run a mail server then automatic IPv6 reverse DNS will only help you so much because it would generate some fixed reverse DNS based only on the v6 address queried. For example, given host ruminant.bitfolk.com: $ host ruminant.bitfolk.com ruminant.bitfolk.com has address 85.119.82.121 ruminant.bitfolk.com has IPv6 address 2001:ba8:1f1:f004::2 An automatic reverse DNS scheme might choose to return the reverse host name as something like: 2001-ba8-1f1-f004-0-0-0-2.autov6rev.bitfolk.com and would also then make sure that 2001-ba8-1f1-f004-0-0-0-2.autov6rev.bitfolk.com had an A record for 2001:ba8:1f1:f004::2. This will help you a little bit in that there is at least some reverse DNS and it matches both ways, but ideally you want it to be the real host name, i.e. ruminant.bitfolk.com. So for proper operation there is no way in escaping having to do a real DNS zone. "Elsewhere" can also be your VPS. It's really a very simple thing to do; I could definitely set it up on a fresh Debian install in less time than it's taken me to write this email. I do appreciate that for someone who's never done it before it could seem intimidating. The thing is, IPv4 and IPv6 are very different for reverse DNS. More than 98% of customers just have a single IPv4 address. It's also possible to fully enumerate the IPv4 reverse zones, so I do: those exist in files somewhere, one file for each /24 of IPv4 space with a pre-generated PTR record in there. And this is also really how we are forced to do it since you can't easily delegate reverse IPv4 on less than a /24's worth of addresses¹. If someone changes one of their addresses it's just a matter of going through the correct file and substituting what is already there with what they have chosen, and so that is what the Panel essentially does. But when it comes to IPv6, they can't be fully enumerated since each customer has a /64, 2⁶⁴-1 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) of them. It has to be done another way. The "other way" that is inherent in the design of DNS is delegation, and it also happens to be the easiest way for us, so that's what we went with. I appreciate that what people actually want is what is easiest for *them*: For us to maintain one IPv6 zone file per customer and add and remove PTR records from it. Hopefully you can see that is very different from how we handle IPv4 and would require the Panel also to be quite different: instead of there being a fixed set of IP addresses like there are with v4, there would need to be the ability to add essentially endless numbers of entries. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying the suggestion that v4 and v6 can be handled consistently doesn't hold. I don't think there is an existing issue in the tracker for this, possibly because I've been so critical of it in the past. But there probably should be, and despite being critical of it I will do it if it's what people want. So: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/176 Anyone interested in seeing that happen should log in and vote it up. To be kept updated as to its progress, please add yourself as a watcher. Meanwhile, the method that already exists and works is delegating the v6 zone to the customer's own server(s). The reason why that is easier on our side is that there is just one zone file to modify (for the delegations), and there's only a simple web UI required for managing the entries, each entry being a delegation, not a PTR. If sending email out of a VPS, I would recommend *not* doing it by IPv6 unless you set your IPv6 reverse DNS. It's usually quite easy to tell the MTA to use a specific address to send out the email, so if I wasn't going to set the v6 reverse DNS I'd recommend setting the MTA to use only the single IPv4 address that has proper reverse DNS. But I would encourage anyone who wants to set their own v6 reverse DNS to at least give setting up their own DNS server a try. A customer who already did it wrote instructions in the wiki: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/IPv6#Reverse_DNS That boils down to: - apt install bind9 - write zone content somewhere like /var/lib/bind/4.0.0.f.1.f.1.0.8.a.b.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa - add zone declaration for "4.0.0.f.1.f.1.0.8.a.b.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa" to /etc/bind/named.conf.local - sudo systemctl reload bind9.service - watch the logs - test with local query: $ dig -x 2001:ba8:1f1:f004::2 @localhost - you could delegate the zone now, but you only have one nameserver. Better would be to contact support(a)bitfolk.com and ask for the zone to be mirrored on the BitFolk nameservers, so do that - when that's all working, go to the Panel and delegate the zone to your VPS and the three BitFolk nameservers, or just the BitFolk ones if you're wanting to do hidden master. That's it. It seems simpler than a lot of other things you've already done on your VPS. It's also a lot of work, as there isn't consistency in how it actually works. Cheers, Andy ¹ Yes, I know there are tricks to do it, and we support them, but given how few customers have more than 1 IPv4 address, customers tend to prefer to just set them directly. ² I expect there is some place I am sending out email from a v6 address with no reverse DNS, but if there is then this is an oversight that I would like to know about. :) _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users