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.

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

Linux Systems Administrator

Job Description

• Work under the Technical Director and with our other system admins to support and run:
• our customers’ Ruby on Rails hosting clusters
• our virtual hosting platform
• our MySQL systems
• our networking infrastructure
• our backup systems
• our network management and monitoring systems
• Provide excellent customer service and support
• Assist with technical sales
• Participate in an out-of-hours on-call rota
• Work from home or our office in Leeds, or a mixture of the two
• Occasional visits to our hosting data centres for new builds and hardware maintenance
• Update technical and process documentation

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience with GNU/Linux based systems
• Experience with web technologies such as NGINX, Apache & mongrel
• Experience with Ruby, Rails desirable
• Familiarity with Puppet, Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LVM desirable
• Familiarity with common Internet services such as DNS and SMTP
• Experience working with customers
• Ability to work both independently and as part of a team
• Keeps up with new technologies and developments
• Good written and verbal communication skills
• Able to commute to Leeds, UK for team meetings

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

Senior Linux Systems Administrator

Job Description

• Work with the Technical Director to design, build and run:

  • our virtual hosting platform

  • our MySQL systems

  • our customers’ Rails clusters

  • our backup systems

  • our networking infrastructure

  • new “cloud computing” services

• Second line support, with some shared first line responsibilities

• Out of hours on-call shifts

• Working with customers

• Assisting with technical sales

• Work from home or our office in Leeds

Qualifications

• 5+ years professional experience managing GNU/Linux based systems

• 2+ years experience with web technologies

• Familiarity with virtualized storage and systems

• Experience with Ruby, Rails, Debian/Ubuntu, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Puppet desirable

• Ability to work both independently and as part of a team

• Keeps up with new technologies and developments

• Good written and verbal communication skills

• Living within 2 hours of the UTC time zone

Linux/Rails System Support

Job Description

• Work under the Technical Director and Senior Systems Administrator to support and run:

  • our customers’ Ruby on Rails hosting clusters

  • our virtual hosting platform

  • our MySQL systems

• First line support

• Out of hours on-call shifts

• Working with customers

• Work from home or our office in Leeds

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience with GNU/Linux based systems

• Experience with Ruby, Rails required

• Familiarity with Puppet, Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LVM desirable

• Experience working with customers

• Good written and verbal communication skills

• Living within 2 hours of the UTC time zone

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)

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.