Archive: posts from April 2009

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.

New: Brightbox Silver & Gold Support 23 Apr 09

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch our new Brightbox Silver and Gold support plans - the details of which we’ve been working on for several months now. These new support offerings are based on customer feedback and experience we’ve gained delivering fully managed clusters and services for several large customers over the last 18 months.

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.

Passenger 2.2.1 Ubuntu beta packages with NGINX support 22 Apr 09

The Phusion team released a new version of Passenger last week, 2.2.1, which sports a shiny new NGINX extension.  It also adds chunked file uploads (Apache only) and improves restarts.

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.

Passenger 2.1.3 packages for Ubuntu Hardy 5 Apr 09

Phusion Passenger 2.1.3 has been released and we’ve updated our Ubuntu packages as usual.  Instructions in the usual place on our wiki.