Archive: posts from December 2007

Planned MySQL Maintenance: 6 Jan 2200hrs-2230hrs 31 Dec 07

We’ll be doing some work on the MySQL cluster on Sunday 6th January 2008 between 2200hrs and 2230hrs. We’re changing the way the clustering is managed to improve stability and also upgrading to fix some security bugs.During the window you may see two or three brief outages (less than 2 minutes at a time). We’ll keep the status page up to date as usual. If you experience any issues after the maintenance window has closed, please submit a support ticket and we’ll deal with it straight away.

Update: (7 Jan 2007) maintenance went well with only few seconds downtime.

Posted 31 December 2007 by John Leach ::: add comment

Brightbox - now with extra FiveRuns goodness! 17 Dec 07

FiveRuns logo

We’re really excited to announce today a new partnership with FiveRuns, the pioneer in monitoring products for Ruby on Rails. From today, our Brightbox 512 products and above will include FiveRuns RM-Manage monitoring.

FiveRuns’ RM-Manage is the first and only Rails application monitoring product to instrument and monitor all aspects of the Rails framework and its supporting infrastructure resources. Combining our scalable Rails hosting environments with FiveRuns industry-first monitoring tools will enable customers to ensure their Rails applications operate at peak performance in a fully monitored server environment.

Here’s what Dean Cruse, vice president of sales and marketing for FiveRuns, says:

Ruby on Rails developers require world-class hosting and management resources 100% dedicated to the framework, and Brightbox delivers. This partnership enables a combined and singular resource in the UK for Rails applications: simple and powerful Rails hosting expertise combined with the industry’s best Rails application monitoring offering.

Read the full Press Release posted on the FiveRuns website.

New customers of Brightbox 512 and above products will be activated with a FiveRuns account, and be able to log-in, download and install the RM-Manage client on their Brightbox servers. FiveRuns will provide full support for all of the new accounts directly. For more information on the partnership, see our partner page.

Existing customers just need to send an email to support@brightbox.co.uk to request their FiveRuns account.

Posted 17 December 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: add comment

Planned Network Maintenance - 18 Dec (between 4 - 7am) 12 Dec 07

** UPDATE: We’ve heard from the datacentre that this maintenance has been postponed until the new year. **

We’ve received notification from the datacentre that during the above period they will be performing maintenance on the core network, involving firmware/software upgrades to core switches and routers to fix several minor issues and further ensure future network stability.

During the window you may see a number of brief outages (less than 2 minutes). If you experience any issues after the maintenance window has closed, please submit a support ticket and we’ll deal with it straight away.

Posted 12 December 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: Comments closed

Secure virtual disk deletion - is your data safe? 4 Dec 07

Everyone knows the dangers of old hard disks being discarded with sensitive data still on them, but what about virtual disks? With so many virtual machine hosting services cropping up of late (hi!), have you ever wondered what happens to your data when you delete your virtual machine?

Usually your machine’s ‘partition’ is just a small part of a larger disk array; the partition is deleted and the space returned for the pool to be used by another virtual machine. This means, the next time someone buys a virtual machine with the same host, some of the blocks that made up your filesystem could end up making up their filesystem. The metadata will be wiped clean when the filesystem is formatted of course, so they won’t just see your files listed, but the blocks can still contain your data. It depends on how they’re managing their disks.

Homework: go buy a virtual machine somewhere and pipe the contents of your new disk through the strings command and look out for anything that isn’t yours (ssh root@newmachine "dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=1M | strings"). Extra credit if you don’t get thrown off your new host on the first day for maxing out the disk IO :)

So, you’re probably careful and securely wipe your sensitive data before you leave, phew. But disk space is virtualised too. The blocks that make up your disk might not all be in order or even all be on the same disk. With snapshots, your data may exist in duplicate too that you can’t even access. And what about if you bought extra disk space, then removed it?

At Brightbox we use Linux’s LVM implementation to manage disk space and these are problems we have to deal with and we take it seriously. All virtual machine disks are wiped at the block level when the machine is deleted or when a new machine is created. The only corner case we’re likely to run into is if a disk image is extended into space that had previously been used as a snapshot or as a disk that was shrunk. Luckily we don’t currently offer snapshots or disk shrinking but it’ll be something we’ll probably offer at some point, so we’ll have to address it then.

Posted 4 December 2007 by John Leach ::: 1 comment