New: reboots and additional VM info in control panel 1 Jul 09

A few days ago we deployed some improvements to our control panel, enabling tighter integration with our backend infrastructure. For the technically minded (or remotely interested) we’re using the magic of AMQP/RabbitMQ to enable this integration and we’ll be using this system to do more over the coming months.

The first fruits of this integration include the ability to initiate a reboot of any of your Brightbox virtual machines and enable you to view more information on the underlying physical host server and storage device.

You can now reboot any of your virtual machines via the control panel by simply clicking the “reboot” link and specifying either a “soft” or “hard” reboot. A soft reboot is the equivalent of running the shutdown -r command within the OS, whereas a hard reboot is equivalent to cutting power. In most cases, if you want to reboot your virtual machine you’ll want to try the soft option first to avoid the risk of filesystem corruption.

The additional virtual machine information is available by clicking the “full details” link next to one of your products. You’ll now see an additional two rows of information, “Host server” and “Storage”, which will now enable customers to make more sense of our status messages when, for example, we need to do some planned maintenance on a particular host server.

We’re constantly working on improving our control panel and we hope these two items are useful to customers, more improvements to follow soon :)

Passenger 2.2.4 packages for Ubuntu 29 Jun 09

Passenger 2.2.4 was released last week and we now have Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.

Passenger 2.2.4 actually is just a small bug fix release for a memory leak in 2.2.3, but obviously brings all the benefits of 2.2.3 too.  A huge number of bugs have been fixed, particularly the “Broken Pipe” errors some sites under heavy loads were experiencing.

As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.

If you’re using Passenger and it’s making you happy, please do consider supporting its development by donating money in the form of an “Enterprise License” direct from Phusion, the company behind it.

New: 4GB Brightbox PLUS increased CPU on 1GB and above! 19 Jun 09

A few days ago we added a new 4GB Brightbox product to our virtual machine range. Several customers have had 4GB boxes for a while now (on special request :) - but they’re now available for anyone. The 4GB Brightbox comes with burstable dual CPU, 50GB SAN storage, 25 MySQL cluster connections and 1.6TB/month data transfer!

We’ve also changed the CPU allocation for Brightbox 1GB and 2GB products so that they now also benefit from being able to burst to 2 CPU cores - effectively doubling CPU for both products!

Previously, the Brightbox 2GB product had a single “dedicated” core but having spent some time reviewing usage stats it was clear that CPU is considerably under utilised across all of our host machines so we could be confident that no existing customers would actually lose out by this change. If you currently have a 1GB or 2GB Brightbox and want to upgrade to the new CPU allocations, raise a support ticket and we’ll arrange the config change and reboot.

Ruby BigDecimal denial of service 10 Jun 09

From ruby-lang.org:

A denial of service (DoS) vulnerability was found on the BigDecimal standard library of Ruby. Conversion from BigDecimal objects into Float numbers had a problem which enables attackers to effectively cause segmentation faults.

ActiveRecord relies on this method, so most Rails applications are affected by this. Though this is not a Rails-specific issue.

We’re currently  building new Ruby packages for Brightbox customers with the relevant patches to fix this vulnerability. We’ll keep this post updated with the latest news.

UPDATE, 15:46 BST: New Ruby EE packages are now available in our Ruby Enterprise Ubuntu repository. We’re working on updates for the standard Ubuntu version of Ruby.

You can confirm that the update fixes the bug with the following command:

ruby -e 'require "bigdecimal";BigDecimal("E99999999").to_s("F");puts "OK"'

If your version of Ruby is vulnerable, you’ll get a “Segmentation fault” error message, otherwise it prints “OK”.

Is it JRuby? 29 May 09

Carl Mercier has forked our “Is it Ruby 1.9” web app to make “Is it JRuby“, to track which gems work with JRuby. This is how free software is supposed to work!

For those of you not in the know, JRuby is a Java implementation of Ruby, allowing you to run Ruby code on a Java Runtime Environment.  If you’re using or playing with JRuby, head over to isitjruby.com with your feedback.

Carl’s Github project is here and our original is here.

New: Brightbox CDN (Content Delivery Network) service 26 May 09

I’m pleased to announce we’ve partnered with CDNetworks, a global leader in CDN technologies, to provide the new Brightbox CDN service - another significant addition to the Brightbox service portfolio.

The Brightbox CDN service works by seamlessly delivering static content (e.g images, css and javascript) to website visitors from a high performance “edge” cache server nearest to their geographic location.

The network of global cache servers consists of 45 Points of Presence (POPs) located in 23 cities, with multiple nodes at each POP - speeding up the serving of assets to a truly global audience.

Brightbox CDN integrates very easily with Rails’ built-in asset helpers. In most cases, customers will need to add just one line to their production environment config:

ActionController::Base.asset_host = "http://assets%d.<appname>.brightcdn.com"

Pricing is per GB, and customers can choose between two simple billing methods, either pay-as-you-go (no contract) or opt for a 12 month commit with significant volume discounts.

For more information, check out the Brightbox CDN service page on our main website. If you have further questions, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

New: Load Balancing service 20 May 09

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new Load Balancing service - which enables customers to distribute requests across multiple Brightbox virtual machines with ease.

It’s always been possible to create virtual load balancers from standard Brightboxes, but our new service now provides a simpler, more reliable and cost effective solution.

How it works

1. We provide you with a new Load Balanced IP address (which resides on our load balancers), which you configure your domain to resolve to. 
2. Our load balancers distribute requests across your pool of healthy Brightbox servers.
3. Health checks are performed every few seconds on each of your Brightboxes. Should one of your Brightboxes becomes unavailable, it is taken out of the load balancing pool until it is available again.

Pricing for the load balancing service starts at only £19/month!  To get started, simply request the load balancing service from Extra Services in your Brightbox account.

If you have any questions on the service, please get in touch.

Join the Brightbox team! 12 May 09

Brightbox is looking for two new people to join the systems team, a Senior Linux Systems Administrator and a Linux/Rails System Support person. Both roles are full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both.

Send a hello, a CV and salary expectations to jobs at the Brightbox UK domain. CVs should be in an open format, preferably PDF or plain text. Closing date is 31^st May 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost

Read the rest of this entry »

Passenger 2.2.2 packages for Ubuntu 1 May 09

Passenger 2.2.2 was released a few days ago and we now have a package available for Ubuntu Hardy.  After a lot of testing, we’re also happy with the recent packaging changes so this is going straight to our stable repository.

This new version of Passenger brings a train-load of NGINX fixes, so our Passenger enabled nginx-brightbox package has been updated too and is available in our testing repository.  More details on using our testing repository here in the 2.2.1 announcement blog post.

Multi CPU beta testers wanted 27 Apr 09

We’re looking at offering multiple CPU Brightboxes and need some willing beta testers.  You need to have a Hardy Brightbox with at least 2gig of RAM (we have some secret 4gig customers out there, we’ll be offering 4gig boxes to everyone soon, don’t worry :). Not everyone is eligible - it depends on which of our clusters your box is on, but we might be able to arrange a move for you if you’re really keen.

In most cases the upgrade shouldn’t even involve any downtime, but in some we may need to upgrade your kernel which will require a reboot.  We have a number of multi CPU boxes already running with no problems, so we don’t expect any serious issues.

If you’re interested, just file a support ticket from within the control panel and someone will be in touch to arrange the free upgrade.