Timezones on your Brightbox 6 Apr 10

You may have thought the time is wrong on your server. Well, it isn’t really, it is just that we prefer to set the default time on Brightboxes to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This is generally considered to be best practice where ever a server is geographically located, however, it may  cause a problem if you are hosting a  geographically specific web application.

If your web application requires a different time-zone such as CET, BST or PST, or Daylight Saving Time is giving you a headache,  take a look at our Wiki page for a timely introduction to the subject of time-zones on Brightboxes.

Linux Sys Admin – Join the Brightbox team! 7 Oct 09

We’re looking for an experienced and motivated Linux Systems Administrator to join our Technical Team here at Brightbox.

You’ll work closely with our Technical Director and Senior Sys Admin to run our virtual hosting platform, our Ruby on Rails hosting clusters, our network and our MySQL databases. A full job description is below.

The role is full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both (the rest of us do a bit of both).

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 24th October 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost

• More jobs available at Brightbox
• More about working for Brightbox

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Join the Brightbox team! 12 May 09

Brightbox is looking for two new people to join the systems team, a Senior Linux Systems Administrator and a Linux/Rails System Support person. Both roles are full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both.

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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)

HowTo do Ethernet Bonding on Ubuntu – Properly 8 Sep 08

It’s amazing how quickly guides on the Internet go out of date. I suppose this one will be no exception. However as I’ve been looking around there doesn’t appear to be a good guide as to how to get bonded ethernet to work in Ubuntu using the network helper scripts. So I thought I’d scribble down what I know.

This guide is designed for the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu (8.10) with a small addendum covering Hardy Heron (8.04.1).

The Debian/Ubuntu networking system is a bit opaque. It works via a default script in /etc/network/interfaces and is described in interfaces(5). (run man interfaces to read it).

This gives you all the standard entries, but it also points out that other packages can install scripts that extend the options the interfaces file understands. And that is how you configure Ethernet bonding.

Configure your switch

Almost certainly you will have to activate LACP on the relevant ports on your switch to get automatic bonding to work. How you do this depends on your switch. (On my test HP 1800-8G switch I just use the web interface and check a couple of boxes).

For Intrepid and Hardy

1. Install the bonding enslave programs and network scripts:

   apt-get install ifenslave

2. Shutdown any active network interfaces you intend to use with bonding

   sudo -s
   ifdown eth0
   ifdown eth1
   etc, etc...

3. Comment out the ethernet configurations from /etc/network/interfaces

   #auto eth0
   #iface eth0 inet dhcp

4. Add in the bonding configuration into /etc/network/interfaces

   auto bond0
   iface bond0 inet dhcp
     slaves all
     bond-mode 4
     bond-miimon 100

5. Bring up the interface with:

   sudo ifup bond0

This brings up a bonded interface using the 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) which is by far the easiest way of configuring a resilient trunk if your switch supports it (and even quite small switches do these days).

There are other modes and options available in the bonding driver all of which can now be specified in the interfaces file. Full gory details in the bonding.txt.gz file in the current linux-doc package.

Similarly you can specify which network interfaces you want to use as the slaves to the bonding driver e.g. slaves eth0 eth1. Look at the documentation in /usr/share/doc/ifenslave-2.6/README.Debian for more details.

Extra Work for Hardy

Hardy’s ifenslave scripts are a little more primitive than Intrepid. It doesn’t auto-load the bonding module the first time you try to use it and it doesn’t set the options automatically. You have to do that the old fashioned way.

1. Create a file called bonding in /etc/modprobe.d with the following config in it.

   alias bond0 bonding
   options bond0 mode=4 miimon=100

2. Load the module into the kernel

   sudo modprobe bond0

3. Clear out any failed bond interface by running ifdown

   sudo ifdown bond0

4. Bring the bond interface up.

   sudo ifup bond0

5. Once you done this once, the system will ensure that the module is loaded automatically on subsequent reboots and the network brought up.