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.

Passenger 2.2.10 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 26 Feb 10

Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.

We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository.  We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.

Passenger 2.2.4 packages for Ubuntu 29 Jun 09

Passenger 2.2.4 was released last week and we now have Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.

Passenger 2.2.4 actually is just a small bug fix release for a memory leak in 2.2.3, but obviously brings all the benefits of 2.2.3 too.  A huge number of bugs have been fixed, particularly the “Broken Pipe” errors some sites under heavy loads were experiencing.

As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.

If you’re using Passenger and it’s making you happy, please do consider supporting its development by donating money in the form of an “Enterprise License” direct from Phusion, the company behind it.

The Passenger™ Masterplan 7 Dec 08

As you’ve probably seen, we’ve been providing Ubuntu packages for Phusion Passenger for some time now (since May, in fact) and have managed to get them accepted into the official Ubuntu repositories already. The inevitable question that’s cropped up recently though (especially with the attention received by the Phusion guys in recent weeks) is “when will you be supporting Passenger?”. That’s something I’m going to address right now…

The quick answer is (stop press) within the next few weeks. Read on for the longer version :)

There are a couple of things we need to do before “officially” supporting Passenger on Brightbox…

1. We need to complete the packaging of Ruby Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu Hardy (which John is working on right now)
2. We need to update the Brightbox gem to support deployment and management with Passenger – as well as Apache/Mongrel and Nginx/Mongrel (which it will continue to do).

Neither of these are particulary mammoth tasks, but we do have a lot of internal projects going on at the same time such as improving the control panel (watch this space) as well as the day-to-day work of running a hosting company and managing clusters for some very large customers [plug].

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we announce Passenger support together with a very special discount offer!

Why not join our announcements list to stay up to date?

Passenger 2.0.4 packages for Ubuntu 2 Dec 08

Version 2.0.4 of the Passenger Rails module for Apache was released today by the Phusion team.  We’ve just released new Ubuntu Hardy packages for it.  If you’re already using the package from our repository, just apt-get update and upgrade.

As before, documentation for our packages is available on our Passenger wiki page.

Passenger package for Ubuntu Hardy updated 28 Nov 08

I’d just like to announce the new version (2.0.3-1bbox4) of our Phusion Passenger/mod_rails package for Ubuntu Hardy (first announced back in May).

The previous version was faulty and resulted in mod_passenger.so being installed in the root dir (doh!) – I’m not sure when that bug crept in.

I’ve also updated the dependencies slightly – it will no longer require the rubygems package.  This helps those of you who have installed gems manually and would rather not use the Ubuntu packages.  If you didn’t install gems manually, you’ll need to explicitly specify the package now.

This, and a little more information can be found on our Passenger wiki page.

If you need help using these packages, or would like to feed back your experiences, go on over to the discussion forum.

Accepted into Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

And if you weren’t aware, our package was accepted into the official Ubuntu repository (in the universe component) so if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, you can use it straight away! (though it does require the packages rubygems).  Another step towards Ubuntu being the perfect rails stack. The source package page can be found here.

Next up, Ruby Enterprise Edition packages…