The last Passenger release, 2.2.10, has a bug that causes Apache to freeze when used under moderate load (Phusion say high load but we’ve seen it on quite moderate conditions). We recommend that anyone using Passenger 2.2.10 upgrade to 2.2.11 asap. Ubuntu Hardy packages are now available in our repository.
Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.
We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository. We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.
We recently previewed some upcoming changes to how users interact with Brightbox accounts. This feature will be going live at 12:00 GMT on Weds 17 Feb and since it represents a change in behaviour for existing customers, I’ve summarised the details below.
Starting at 12:00 (midday) on Weds 17 Feb, the Brightbox control panel will be unavailable for approximately 20 minutes whilst we perform the updates. One of the updates will include a migration to create an owner user account (name and email address) for all existing active customer accounts.
Once the above maintenance period is completed, you’ll be able to login to the control panel again as normal, but now using your registered email address to login, together with the existing password.
Once logged in you’ll be able to give other people access to your account via the “User access” link.
It’s important to note that initially, as described below, all users that you give access to your account will have full access (apart from the ability to invite other users).
Currently, customers are able to specify two additional “contacts” on their account – a billing contact (receives cc’ed payment email notifications) and a technical contact (receives copies of support ticket notifications and server notifications). These “old style” contacts do not have access to the account, unless the account owner supplies them with the account username and password.
The main purpose of this work is to enable a “many to many” relationship between users and accounts i.e multiple users can access a single account and single users can have multiple accounts. We will be introducing a more extensive permissions system into the control panel in due course, but in the meantime the four “roles” that users can have will each have full access to the account but differ in their behaviour…
If you have any questions about these changes and how they will affect you, please drop us an email.
I’ve just properly announced my Ruby full text indexing library, Xapian Fu, on my personal blog. It’s a Ruby interface to Xapian, an open source search engine Library. Xapian Fu basically gives you a Hash interface to Xapian – so you get a persistent Hash with full text indexing built in.
For example:
require 'xapian-fu'
include XapianFu
db = XapianDb.new(:dir => 'example.db', :create => true,
:store => [:title, :year])
db << { :title => 'Brokeback Mountain', :year => 2005 }
db << { :title => 'Cold Mountain', :year => 2004 }
db << { :title => 'Yes Man', :year => 2008 }
db.flush
db.search("mountain").each do |match|
puts match.values[:title]
end
The full announcement is here, github project here and rdoc here. Hope you find it useful!
We’ve just pushed some updates to the MySQL slow query warning interface in the Brightbox control panel, which includes two main improvements.
Firstly, where the same (or very similar) query occurs more than once, they are aggregated together rather than being recorded as individual slow queries. The user interface displays the count so you can see exactly how many times this slow query occurred in the last 7 days.
Secondly, the full SQL query is now displayed, so customers now have more information with which to optimise their applications.
Today I’m pleased to announce a new revision of the Brightbox Deployment Gem, version 2.3.6. This release fixes some of the issues reported to us by our users, along with a few extra features.
The documentation on the wiki has been updated with the new fixes and features. If you have any tips or find any errors just let us know.
NEW FEATURES
Just as you can currently define gems your application relies on and have them automatically installed onto your servers, you can now do the same with apt packages. Define them in your deploy.rb and they’ll be installed before installing your required rubygems, which means you can use it to install apt packages that gems depend on. As an example, the nokogiri gem depends on a couple of apt packages.
depend :remote, :apt, "libxml2-dev"
depend :remote, :apt, "libxslt1-dev"
depend :remote, :gem, "nokogiri", ">= 0"
Support for Intermediate SSL Certificates in Apache has been added, meaning you no longer need to manually edit the Apache config files directly. Just add one line to your deploy.rb and the gem now takes care of updating the Apache config for you. An example SSL configuration:
set :ssl_certificate, "my_cert.pem"
set :ssl_key, "my_cert.key"
set :ssl_intermediate, "intermediate.crt"
See the wiki page for Adding SSL Support to Apache for more information.
A common issue we’ve seen with is setting the deploy password. If you put it in deploy.rb, then it inevitably ends up in your source control repository, which is a bad idea. A workaround we’ve suggested in the past is to have a deploy.local.rb file, which isn’t tracked by source control, and load that from within your deploy.rb file. This allows you to have the password (or any other sensitive settings) defined, but kept outside your source control.
As part of this release, the gem now has official support for a deploy.local.rb file. If it exists, the gem will load it in for you.
For more information see the Advanced Gem Settings page on the wiki.
If you’ve made manual changes to your webserver (apache or nginx) configuration, then you don’t want an accidental deploy:setup to overwrite your configs. Up until now you just had to avoid running the command, but now there’s a setting to disable it for you.
set :generate_webserver_config, false
FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS
Over the last few months, we’ve been seeing increasing number of requests about our SLA (Service Level Agreement) – do we have one? if not then why not? and so on.
We’ve been reasonably resistant to publishing an SLA until now, not because of doubts over our infrastructure or ability to deliver, but because of the minimal value we felt it would add for customers in the event of actual downtime. We’re a pragmatic bunch at Brightbox and like to avoid adding things just for the sake of it or “because everyone else does” :)
However, and it’s a pretty big “however”, we understand that for many people an SLA or “uptime guarantee” is a useful gauge of whether a provider is actually willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and make a financial commitment to meeting a specific minimum target.
So, I’m pleased to announce that from 1 Jan 2010 (backdated) Brightbox offers a 99.95% SLA on virtual machine and load balancing products (see Terms and Conditions for details). We’ll likely expand the SLA soon to also cover our MySQL products and other products currently in the pipeline, but we’ll need a different method of assessing “availability” for these products.
Right now, each Brightbox customer has a single username/password to access their Brightbox account. For many smaller customers, this works fine and they can easily operate the various aspects of their account themselves e.g manage virtual machines, billing and support tickets. However, there are also a number of scenarios where this doesn’t work too well – especially when there are multiple people managing one or more accounts.
We’ve been developing a more robust solution for users and accounts for some time and hope to launch this new system in the next few weeks. In this post, I’d like to give a sneak preview on the forthcoming changes…
Over the next couple of weeks, all customers will receive an email explaining the changes and the migration process.
The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs. As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.
This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on. We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.
I’m speaking at this month’s North West Ruby Group meeting about some of the tools available that can be used to solve common Ruby and Rails deployment and development problems. “UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel”.
Brightbox is also sponsoring the meeting so there will be free pizza afterwards (free as in pizza, not as in speech).
More details on the NWRUG blog page.
Hope to see you there!
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