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)

Ruby Security Vulnerabilities 25 Jun 08

Some of you will have noticed the kerfuffle regarding the recent Ruby security vulnerabilities.  Fixed version of Ruby were released over the weekend but they are causing crashes in applications.  Until working fixes are available we’re all a bit stuck.

Details of the bugs have been kept officially secret but people are figuring it out for themselves (thanks to Zed in particular).  This secrecy has just contributed to the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the issues and hasn’t helped the situation at all.

We currently recommend sitting tight until proper fixes are available.  When this happens, distros will release new packages in the usual manner.  Brightboxes are based on the Ubuntu distro and their security team are aware of the problem and are working on it (see the bug status here).

For those of you using the standard Ruby from Dapper (most of you) you should be able to just upgrade  using aptitude as soon as Ubuntu release new packages.  For those of you using the backported Ruby 1.8.6 packages, you’ll need to wait for us to backport the fixes once they’re released.  We’ll obviously be doing this asap.

We’ll update the blog as we know more.

UPDATE: Ubuntu have fixed ruby1.8 packages available now. They have already appeared in the Ubuntu security repository and are available for install.  Preliminary testing of the Dapper packages has been successful (gems with native libraries too).  We’re re-backporting the Hardy 1.8.6 packages right now and they’ll be available soon.

UPDATE: We have the fixed Hardy packages (1.8.6-p111) backported to Dapper available on the Brightbox testing apt repository.  They’ve passed a lot of preliminary tests but have not been tested extensively in production yet.  Please report any problems  with them (segfaults etc.) to support@brightbox.co.uk.

Brightbox builds Hardy Passenger package 21 May 08

We’ve created an Ubuntu Hardy package for Passenger - the apache ‘mod_rails’ hosting solution written by the team at Phusion, and sent the resulting patches back upstream to improve Passenger for everybody.

The package is available from the Brightbox repository at http://apt.brightbox.net and is called ‘libapache2-mod-passenger’.

Brightboxes have the repository in place by default, but you can easily add the repository to your system with the following commands:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox.list'
sudo sh -c 'wget -q -O - http://apt.brightbox.net/release.asc | apt-key add -'
sudo apt-get update

There will be a beta Passenger Brightbox machine available soon and we’re probably going to need some volunteers to trial it out. So if you like your Rails Hosting bleeding edge then let me know and I’ll put you on the list.

If you do use the .deb, be warned that I’m changing it all the time at the moment as Passenger evolves and I’m following Passenger trunk very closely.