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.

Brightbox sponsor the Scottish Ruby Conference 2010 23 Mar 10

After having such a good time at last year’s event, Team Brightbox is heading to Edinburgh again later this week for the Scottish Ruby Conference.

Again, we’re sponsoring the event and have provided hosting for the website. Our technical director John Leach is also speaking at the conference – his talk “UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel” will take place in the Great Hall on Friday afternoon.

John, Jeremy & Caius will all be attending the conference so make sure you say hi – and grab one of our always popular t-shirts too!

Paul joins Team Brightbox! 7 Dec 09

We welcomed our latest addition to the Brightbox team a fortnight ago – Paul Thornthwaite.

Experienced programmer Paul was a beta tester for Brightbox back in our very early days and has now come on board as our new senior developer. He’ll be joining Baz and Caius working on our customer-facing control panel and our behind-the-scenes systems, and he’ll also take a lead in project managing all the development side of things.

Welcome to the team, Paul!

Queues and Callbacks 3 Nov 09

A major part of our work behind the scenes is about improving our internal processes and, whenever possible, automating tasks. To this end we have a number of systems that need to communicate with each other.

The Control Panel that you may be familiar with uses Delayed Job. This is a Rails-specific gem that uses the database as a queue, with a nicely packaged worker process that handles messages as they arrive. Because the Control Panel only ever talks to Rails from Rails, this worked extremely well.

However, our other systems were not homogenous – there are a number of different interfaces that needed to be instructed at various times and across various machines, and Delayed Job didn’t really fit the bill. In particular, there were some tasks that could only happen on certain servers – while Delayed Job let us have multiple worker processes on different boxes, it essentially managed a single queue, so it could not differentiate between messages for one worker and messages for another.
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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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Rails form helper security vulnerability 4 Sep 09

A vulnerability has been found in the Rails form helpers that allows an attacker to inject arbitrary HTML into pages.  This opens up an unpatched Rails app to potential cross site scripting attacks (XSS), which could result in stolen session cookies and other such scenarios.

All versions of Rails above and including version 2.0 are affected. There are two new official releases to fix this, 2.3.4 and 2.2.3.  If you’re still running Rails 2.0 or 2.1 and can’t upgrade, patches have been provided by the security team but need applying manually.  In this case, we’d recommend vendoring the rails gems and then applying the patches.

More details from the security team here.

Senior Rails Developer – Join the Brightbox team! 24 Aug 09

We’re currently looking for an experienced and motivated Senior Rails Developer/Project Manager to join our development team here at Brightbox.

You’ll work closely both with our Development and Technical Teams to develop our customer control panel and other backend systems. We’re looking for someone who, in addition to being a great coder, will be an integral part of the team and an organised and enthusiastic project manager.

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 Friday 11th September 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost
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Rails: so successful it’s starting to hurt? 2 Jun 08

One thing that we often hear from customers is how difficult it is find Rails developers. Which is funny since we also hear people saying how they’d love a job building Rails applications.

The well-being of the Rails community is important to us, so we’d like to try and do what we can to keep it bubbling along nicely :)

One of the ideas that came up was some sort of Rails training network that would help bridge any skills gap. But before we do anything, we want to understand whether there is actually a skills gap, or just an “expectation gap” in either price or experience (anybody with any sort of Rails commercial experience is almost certainly gainfully employed at a good rate at the moment).

So, we’d like to hear from you if…

1) You’re in the market for Rails talent and would either be interested in using a Rails training programme, or interested in talking to ‘graduates’ of such a programme or

2) You’re a developer and you’d be interested in signing up for a Rails training programme and potentially getting your name in front of Rails employers.

Drop us an email to hello [at] the brightbox uk domain – we’ll gauge interest and take it from there.

Brightbox Gem v0.24 2 Nov 07

I’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox Gem. It might takes a few hours to get to all the Rubyforge mirrors but in the mean time you can download and install it manually directly from the project page.

It’s largely just a maintenance release, which means no Capistrano v2.0 support just yet, it still requires Capistrano 1.4.1. Cap 2.0 support is in the works though and will be released soon.

A quick summary of the changes:

• Fixes default Monit config bug (changes totalmem to mem, no more false memory overage alarms!)
• Fails out if MySQL database exists on cold_deploy (you really shouldn’t be running a cold_deploy a second time anyway)
• Adds reconfigure task (for easy adding of mongrels or domain changes)
• Archives Apache configs on cold_deploy or reconfigure
• Fixes Capistrano 1.4 dependency (will pull in v1.4.1 if necessary now)
• Changes default Apache log location to /var/log/web (for new cold_deploys or reconfigures)

Remember that you need to upgrade the Brightbox gem both in your development environment and on your Brightbox.

The HOWTO on deploying your Rails app using the Brightbox is here as usual.

Why we chose Ubuntu Dapper Drake 3 Aug 07

We’ve had a few beta testers ask about why we chose Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) as our primary Xen guest installation, as opposed to one of the more recent releases such as Edgy or Feisty. We chose it primarily because of its support contract.

Ubuntu’s release schedule sees a new version released roughly every 6 months. These releases contain the very latest versions of the software packaged with it and are supported for only 18 months. Once in a while a version is selected as Long Term Support release (LTS) which gets 5 years of server support (3 years for desktop). By support, I mean the Ubuntu team are committed to releasing security upgrades in a timely manner. Dapper was the first LTS version and is support through to June 2011.

If we’d chosen Edgy, security upgrades wouldn’t be available to us after April 2008, forcing all of our Brightboxers to upgrade to Feisty, and so on every 18 months. With the speed that the Rails community jump deployment strategy ships some might say this isn’t a problem, but most installations do need long term stability and Dapper provides that.

There are some issues though, mainly that Dapper’s version of Apache is too old to support the nice proxy balancing stuff that’s used for Mongrel deployments¹. To solve this, we chose to use a backported Apache package². This does mean that we have to commit to backporting all security fixes, but this is trivial compared to all our guest machines needing a full upgrade every 18 months. We still get the Ubuntu team working for us on the other 99.9% of packages.

For our users who like to ride the bleeding edge, they can still upgrade to Feisty themselves if they know what they are doing but for most, this isn’t what Brightbox is all about.

¹ A beta tester pointed us in the direction of this bug report requesting an official Apache backport for Dapper. The more people testing these packages and voicing their support, the more likely this might happen.

² We’re using the backported Apache package provided by kodefoo.com at the moment (http://www.kodefoo.com/2007/2/18/deploying-rails-on-ubuntu-dapper/) but are ready to roll our own if necessary.