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 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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

Senior Linux Systems Administrator

Job Description

• Work with the Technical Director to design, build and run:

  • our virtual hosting platform

  • our MySQL systems

  • our customers’ Rails clusters

  • our backup systems

  • our networking infrastructure

  • new “cloud computing” services

• Second line support, with some shared first line responsibilities

• Out of hours on-call shifts

• Working with customers

• Assisting with technical sales

• Work from home or our office in Leeds

Qualifications

• 5+ years professional experience managing GNU/Linux based systems

• 2+ years experience with web technologies

• Familiarity with virtualized storage and systems

• Experience with Ruby, Rails, Debian/Ubuntu, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Puppet desirable

• Ability to work both independently and as part of a team

• Keeps up with new technologies and developments

• Good written and verbal communication skills

• Living within 2 hours of the UTC time zone

Linux/Rails System Support

Job Description

• Work under the Technical Director and Senior Systems Administrator to support and run:

  • our customers’ Ruby on Rails hosting clusters

  • our virtual hosting platform

  • our MySQL systems

• First line support

• Out of hours on-call shifts

• Working with customers

• Work from home or our office in Leeds

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience with GNU/Linux based systems

• Experience with Ruby, Rails required

• Familiarity with Puppet, Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LVM desirable

• Experience working with customers

• Good written and verbal communication skills

• Living within 2 hours of the UTC time zone

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.

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.

Silver support acts as an extension to our renowned “standard” Bronze support and includes 24/7 emergency telephone support and 30 minutes of Hands-on support each month. Silver support is priced at £49/month or 20% of account spend (whichever is greater).

Gold support is our proactive, fully managed service and includes all features of Bronze and Silver plans plus inclusive Managed Backups, application/cluster support and 24/7 monitoring and response. Gold support is priced at £349/month or 30% of account spend (whichever is greater).

We continue to offer “Pay-as-you-go” hands-on support from our experts at £30 per 30 minutes.

For further information on support plans or any of our services, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

We’ve had to restructure the way our Ubuntu packages are built to enable installation of the NGINX extension, so needs more extensive testing than usual.  The packages are now available for Ubuntu Hardy in our testing repository.

You’ll need to add our testing repository to your apt sources list. And if you’re not on a Brightbox, you’ll need to import our key and add our stable repository too.

Once you’ve done that, you can install the new version of Passenger.  If you’re wanting to just install the Apache version:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

This will pull in a new dependency, passenger-common.

If you just want to get stuck in with the new NGINX support, install the nginx-brightbox package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox

This will also pull in the passenger-common dependency. This is NGINX 0.6.36 plus some useful modules: upload progress, upstream fair, geoip, ey-balancer and access key. It will replace any other NGINX packages you have installed (NGINX does not support dynamic modules like Apache).

You can install both Apache and NGINX side by side, but you’ll obviously need to run them on different ports.

The 2.2.1 Apache package has already had quite a bit of testing by us, but the NGINX package has had very little. We’ve already come across a Passenger bug with reloading NGINX (reported here), though we expect this will be fixed quickly.  So basically, these are good to play with but not for production just yet.

If you need any help with these packages, try our Passenger support forum.

Each SoR attendee will get a voucher for a free beer, glass of wine or soft drink and some pizza, so bring yours along and hand it to the bar staff.

When?
Friday 27th March @ 10pm (straight after lightning talks)

Where?
Fingers Piano Bar, 61 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LH (map)

See you there!

The details are on the usual page on our wiki.  If you have any problems or need any help, try our forums.

The new packages depend on new versions of the Ruby rack libraries (not the gem), but this is provided in our repository too and will be automatically installed. You need to install the fastthread gem yourself though.  Our repository provides a few other useful Hardy packages too.

We are only testing our packages against Ubuntu Hardy right now, but they should install and run fine on newer versions of Ubuntu too.

Remember, for maximum memory savings (and speed improvements) try our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages for Ubuntu Hardy (currently only 32bit packages available).

Every Brightbox runs Ubuntu, which is an operating system built on top of the GPL Linux kernel. Our infrastructure is built upon Xen, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, Nagios and many other open source software projects; not least of which are Ruby and Rails themselves.

But whilst we benefit from this software, without contribution, free software is nothing, so we contribute anything we can. The most obvious of these are the Brightbox deployment gem and its associated server-side tools. These are extensions to Capistrano that help you get your application onto your Brightbox as quickly and easily as possible.

We also have our apt repository where we repackage a number of free software projects to make configuring your Brightbox as easy as possible. More details on the repository are available on the wiki, but the most notable are our Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition packages.

However, nowadays, the real place for sharing your code is on Github. We have a number of projects available there, ranging from the tiny to the large.

These include:

• Flashing rails

  A rails plugin that makes it simple to display flash messages in your views in a consistent manner.

• Rujitsu

  A simple gem that collects together a number of convenience methods and various helpers.

• RSpec-rails extensions

  A gem that tidies up specifying your code with RSpec-Rails.

• Object Factory

  Brightbox’s very own answer to Factory Girl or Machinist that lets you build your test data with minimal configuration and no fixtures.

• Altered Beast and Redmine.

  We have taken our own forks of two popular Rails applications. David’s version of Altered Beast handles the Brightbox forums and Redmine handles our internal bug tracking and task lists.

• Warren and Bigwig

  Last, but by no means least, we have Warren and Bigwig. These are our wrappers to AMQP and RabbitMQ.

  We use RabbitMQ internally to deliver messages across our various infrastructure systems and needed a simple way to interface our ruby code to Rabbit (which is implemented in Erlang).

  This led to Warren, our wrapper over the AMQP protocol that make it simple to post messages onto the queue.

  In order to receive and act on those messages, we also built Bigwig (no prizes for spotting the rabbit references there), which takes those messages and responds. Bigwig matches each incoming message against a set of plugins, each plugin being small and focused on a particular task. Unrecognised messages are discarded, ensuring that rogue commands can’t wreak havoc upon our network.
  UPDATE: It turns out that Bigwig isn’t quite ready yet, as a big chunk has been rewritten. We’ll get it out there as soon as we can.

As these are all free software projects, please take a look inside and poke around. Any suggestions, improvements, patches or forks will be gratefully received. Also, stay tuned for an announcement on a major project we are looking to start in the next couple of weeks.

Update 2: We’ve also put the code for Isitruby19.com onto Github, under an MIT licence. Please go to the forum if you have any questions.

This Wednesday (4th March), Rahoul and myself will be travelling down to the Big Smoke for the inaugural Rails Business Meetup at the Benugo Bar at BFI Southbank.

Afterwards, we’ll be out and about in London for a few hours so if any customers, potential customers or random rubyists fancy a coffee or a beer on us, drop me a mail at jeremy@brightbox.co.uk

Version 2.3 of the gem fixes some issues reported to us by our users. A quick summary of the changes from the release notes:

• Removed the Capistrano task which calls the db:check:config rake task. This task was introduced to help with a common config mistake, but just resulted in a different mistake becoming common.
• Removed the Capistrano task which calls rake gems:install. Running this as sudo was causing some permissions errors caused by initialising the Rails stack as root.
• Fixed how we track the commands the gem depends upon, the deploy:check command now works as expected.
• Gem dependencies are now installed by listing them in deploy.rb, extra examples have been added to the boilerplate deploy file.

The change in the way we handle gem dependencies was the reasoning behind making this a minor version release. Previously we simply called the inbuilt Rails 2.2 gem install task.  However we found some issues where customers with fresh deployments when running this command as root would result in files being created that could not then be removed during subsequent deployments. We took the decision to use the inbuilt capistrano dependencies to handle the installation of remote gems (examples are available inside the deploy.rb that the brightbox command automatically generates for you).

Update 24/2/2009: We’ve just pushed a new version, 2.3.2 that changes slightly how the gem dependencies work. You now specify a dependency with an alternate source in your deploy.rb like this:

depend :remote, :gem, "tmm1-amqp", ">=0.6.0", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

However, there is a significant barrier to Ruby 1.9 adoption; the compatibility of the gems that we have all come to depend on.  

Which is why we’ve launched isitruby19.com - a site that tracks gems and lists whether they are 1.9 compatible.  Each time you come across a gem that works for you, drop by and leave a comment, so we all get a feel for which gems need some work and which are ready today.

John, David, Rahoul, Caius and myself will all be travelling up to Edinburgh for the event - so please come and say “Hi”.

Of course, never fear, we’ll bring plenty of our famous t-shirts and stickers :)

We’ve also added the ability for separate billing and technical email contacts to your account in addition to the regular account holder email address (this is a stop-gap addition until we implement multiple users per account which is on our development roadmap :)

Here’s a summary of notifications and recipients:

• Order confirmation: account holder, billing contact & technical contact
• Successful or Failed payment: account holder & billing contact
• Credit card expiry notice: account holder & billing contact
• New virtual machine deployed: account holder & technical contact
• New Helpdesk request: account holder & technical contact
• Password reset: account holder
• MySQL slow query alerts: account holder & technical contact

Keep watching over the next few weeks as we announce more improvements, including remote reboots…

You can now add your own simple labels to each of your boxes so you can quickly remember which box is which. Previously, you only really had the box hostname e.g myapp-001.vm.brightbox.net as a reference, but you can now also add your own label e.g “Bob’s staging server”.

With our recent diskspace and bandwidth upgrades on all products and now with Phusion Passenger support there’s certainly never been a better time to buy a Brightbox server. Either get 50% off annual pricing or opt for monthly billing and get 50% off for the first 3 months!

Offer pricing is as follows:

• Brightbox 256 - now only £19.50/month or £195/year SAVE 50%
  (10GB SAN storage, 100GB bandwidth)
• Brightbox 512 - now only £34.50/month or £345/year SAVE 50%
  (20GB SAN storage, 200GB bandwidth)
• Brightbox 1GB - now only £54.50/month or £545/year SAVE 50%
  (30GB SAN storage, 400GB bandwidth)
• Brightbox 2GB - now only £99.50/month or £995/year SAVE 50%
  (40GB SAN storage, 800GB bandwidth)

Don’t forget, all our plans come with access to our managed MySQL cluster and are “Carbon Neutral”.

UPDATE (26 Jan): 5 days left, don’t miss out!

We’ve made it super easy to deploy your application using Passenger instead of the mongrel configuration recommended previously and there is documentation on how to use this on your Brightbox over at our wiki. New deployments are ready to go on Passenger immediately provided you have Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 already installed on your Brightbox. If you’re still on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 then you can upgrade by simply ordering a new box, moving your data over and then cancelling the old box.

There is no automated way to move existing mongrel installs over to Passenger, but there is a very simple procedure outlined on the wiki page which will have you up and running in a few minutes.

If you have any questions or spot any bugs in this latest release then please let us know, we now have a forum on which we will be happy to answer your Passenger and Brightbox gem questions.

Update 12/01/2009: After spotting a regression which snuck in just before we released version 2.2, version 2.2.1 has just been released and should be propogating around the Rubyforge mirrors right now.

Update 2 13/01/2009: I found a better way to handle passenger restarts. This has been added to the gem and the version has been bumped to 2.2.2

We’re now also providing 64bit versions of the packages (the source of the 404 errors some of you reported when trying to install the package).

Documentation for the packages in the usual place on the wiki.

More Passenger news coming soon :)