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.

On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 at 15:12, Christopher Roberts <cjr(a)tridenthonda.co.uk> wrote: I would actually like this, too. I'm looking to refresh/reinstall my VPS and wondered what the quickest way to achieve this is. I will send an email off-list, though. Cheers, Gerald _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

Hi, Here is a list of open feature requests and the number of votes they have received: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues?query_id=1 (You can vote an issue up or down once you are logged in and viewing it) I am currently working on making a "billing" role for the address book, so that invoices can be sent to different/multiple people. That was actually the most desired thing of the whole "address book" feature and will allow for getting rid of a few cumbersome mail aliases that we have. I can take it as said that everyone wants "better spec VPSes for less money" but after I'm done with the billing role I'll move on to something else and I will use this list of issues and their votes to help me make that decision¹. At the moment it's looking like people really want to be able to add and remove secondary DNS domains from the panel. Next up is an SMS alerting method for Nagios, which I suppose now carries over for Icinga2. I am really sceptical about this. Mainly I worry that very few people will actually use it, and every SMS sent costs BitFolk money, so is it a good use of resources? If I don't charge for it then every customer not making use of it will be subsidising those who do. And as some people let alerts just fire over and over. Charging for it brings other issues, chiefly that once real money is being charged everything becomes much more serious; I start to wonder if this may be appropriate for a service whose main purpose is monitoring your stuff, but not for one that throws in monitoring as a free perk. I would be more comfortable implementing Pushover alerts as these are free to send (within some massive limit). There is a one-off fee to the Pushover app developers per receiving device. I will not do that however unless there is at least 1 person who might use it. If you are such a person, please vote it up: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/issues/174 Further down the list, the configurable lead time for raising invoices it quite likely to happen. There's a couple of corporate customers who regularly complain that 30 days is not enough time to pay an invoice and are unable/unwilling to do Direct Debit. I'm not extending credit terms any further than 30 days so the solution for them will be to have invoices raised and sent to them sooner. If you have any comments on these feature requests, or ideas for new ones, ideally please submit them at: https://tools.bitfolk.com/redmine/projects but posting here is okay if you feel it needs a more conversational start. Cheers, Andy ¹ Though just because people want something doesn't mean that it's easy or even possible, so the feature requests made and the votes they have are only one factor, not the deciding factor. _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

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