Archive: posts from October 2008

Brightbox Forums Launched 31 Oct 08

We’ve just launched Brightbox Forums.

This will be the best place to start to get help with using your Brightbox or just to chat about anything you like. So, create an account and join in…

New: order upgrades via Control Panel 29 Oct 08

This is something we’ve been promising for a while now, but thanks to some sterling work from Rahoul and Caius, I’m pleased to say that you can now very easily upgrade any of your Brightbox virtual machines via the Control Panel. Simply login, click the “upgrade” link alongside the relevant virtual machine and choose the size of box you wish to upgrade to.

Also, we’ve recently deployed additional server capacity, meaning our lead times for both upgrades and new boxes are now down to original levels.

David Smalley joins the team 21 Oct 08

Hot on the heels of Caius earlier this month, we’re really pleased to welcome David Smalley to the Brightbox team. We’ve known David for some time now so it’s great to finally be able to bring him on board.

David brings a wide range of technical and sys admin skills to the team and will work closely with John, managing and developing our hosting systems and infrastructure. David is also based in Leeds, again highlighting the wealth of talent here in the North (and Leeds in particular).

New service status blog 20 Oct 08

We’re moving the service status feed from Twitter to a full blog over on Wordpress.com.  The address of the new service is http://status.brightbox.co.uk/

Please update your bookmarks and feed readers.

Happy Birthday Ubuntu! 20 Oct 08

Today is Ubuntu’s 4th birthday.  Ubuntu is the GNU/Linux distro that makes our Brightboxes rock.

Happy birthday Ubuntu!

Brightbox Gem v2.1.2 released 9 Oct 08

I have released v2.1.2 of the Brightbox deployment gem onto Rubyforge today. This update to the gem is thanks to all the feedback we’ve received from customers over the summer.

The documentation on the wiki has been updated to cover the new features and fixes. If you have any tips or find any errors, you can edit the wiki yourself, or just let us know.

NEW FEATURES

Cluster support

The gem handles mongrels that are not on the same server as the web server. All you need do is set the mongrel host to ‘:remote’ and the gem will work out from your :app definitions where the mongrels are.

Nginx SSL support

Those using Nginx can now deploy SSL automatically in the same way as Apache.

Enhanced shared area management

We’ve improved the shared area system so that it now works globally across all your servers (assuming you have a shared network drive). Simply set global_shared_path to a directory on the network and list your shared directories and files in global_shared_dirs and global_shared_files.

Adjustable monit monitoring

You can now increase (or decrease) the amount of memory and cpu your mongrels are allowed to use and change the url that monit checks to determine if your application is working properly.

‘Rich’ maintenance page

Many customers are unhappy with the slightly stark standard Capistrano maintenance page. So we’ve improved the system allowing you to have a fully styled static web site where the simple maintenance page once lived.

Simple staging environment

The gem has been altered so that it will work properly with the standard Capistrano multistage extensions.

Easier management of rake tasks

Two new tasks have been created so that you can easily change and extend the rake tasks that are run after code deployment.

FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS
Other improvements include:

• REST verbs now work with page cached content.
• The apache deflate module is on by default.
• The gem now detects which web server you have in place and manipulates the correct one.
• Separate error pages for each of the 5xx error pages on Nginx.
• Going into maintenance returns the correct 503 error and doesn’t change the URL.
• Static assets are cached aggressively in the browser, with fine control available in deploy.rb if required.

Introducing Caius Durling 6 Oct 08

We’re really pleased to welcome Caius Durling to our team. Caius is a talented developer and will initially be working closely with Baz on [re]developing our own billing and customer management Rails applications.

Caius is something of a legend in the Leeds Geek scene, even though he only moved to our lovely city a couple of months ago. The fact that most of us first “met” Caius through Twitter says something about his prolific and entertaining addiction :)

Now with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy powers 2 Oct 08

We’ve now switched to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) as our default Brightbox image.

We’ve been using Hardy for months now to power our managed products and clusters and it’s proved very stable.  Some of the highlights:

• Ruby 1.8.6 as standard
• Apache 2.2.8 as standard
• Imagemagick 6.3 as standard (roll on the new rmagick gems!)
• Git 1.5.4 as standard
• Better virtualisation support - we can now live upgrade ram on Brightboxes without a reboot

It still comes pre-configured for Rails deployment and we’re still providing improved and extra packages where necessary (such as nginx 6.31).

We’re also still supporting our Ubuntu Dapper machines and can still pre-install Dapper for customers who are already using it on their other boxes.

Upgrading

Due to the way Brightboxes are built, you can’t easily upgrade your Dapper box to Hardy.  Currently, the only supported way to upgrade is to file a support ticket with us and we’ll rebuild your Brightbox as Hardy.  This will require downtime and redeployment of your app (a good time to move to the new Brightbox deployment gem if you haven’t already)