Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)

We’ve also fixed the dependency problems that occurred in the past, where a newer version of Passenger broke the older NGINX packages. These NGINX packages now strictly depend on the Passenger packages, and we’ve put them in their own Launchpad archive so they’re always guaranteed to work (even if they ever lag behind the Apache packages).

You can add the PPA and install NGINX like this:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passenger-nginx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-full

You’ll then need to enable the Passenger module, which can be usually done like this:

cat <<EOF > /etc/nginx/conf.d/passenger.conf
passenger_root /usr/lib/phusion-passenger;
EOF

We’ve also added our other Apache Passenger packages to Launchpad too (with Hardy support), just use:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passenger

We’ll keep our own apt repository in sync with Launchpad for Hardy and Lucid too, in case you prefer that (use the passenger-nginx component for the nginx passenger packages).

Happy Passengering! (I’m pretty certain that’s not a real verb. It might be a proper verb. I’m pretty certain there is no such thing as a proper verb).

We’ve now got Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid packages available on our apt repository and we consider it ready for production use. Brightbox customers can upgrade from Passengr 2.x simply by running these commands on their Brightboxes:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -qy libapache2-mod-passenger

If you’ve not got a Brightbox, you’ll need to add our apt repository key and config first. You can read more about it on our wiki.

Why use 64-bit?

There are a number of advantages to 64-bit architectures.

• Increased performance with >3GB of RAM – Addressing more than 3GB of RAM in userland on 32-bit linux requires the use a PAE which incurs a small performance overhead, this is not necessary with 64-bit. This can benefit applications that access large amounts of memory such as MySQL.
• Larger memory-mapped files – Particularly useful for a number of key-value/nosql databases such as Redis and others that use memory-mapped files for storage. MongoDB, for example, is limited to ~2.5GB of storage on 32-bit architectures.
• Certain number-crunching applications such as encryption and audio/video encoding can benefit greatly from access to 64-bit registers, offering considerable performance increases.

However, 64-bit isn’t always beneficial! In nearly all cases a 64-bit process will require (sometimes considerably) more memory than an identical 32-bit process due to larger pointers and other data-types occupying more space. This is particularly prevalent with Ruby where many of the internal data structures double in size when switching to 64-bit. Before deciding on 64-bit you should weigh up the pros and cons for your particular application.

For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.

When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

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.

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.

This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on.  We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile
sudo a2enmod xsendfile
sudo invoke-rc.d apache reload

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).  We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.

If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

Then update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).

Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!

I wanted one that worked well with Linux, preferably Ubuntu Netbook Remix, had SSD rather than hard disk, and built-in 3G connectivity.

I’ve picked the Acer Aspire One (AAO) A110. It was available in the UK from Tesco in this spec with 1GB of RAM for GBP 179 – a bargain.

It came with a truly dreadful pre-installed build of Windows XP Home. Very slow and very much not recommended. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is, on the other hand, superb.

I’ve installed the pre-release Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic”. Here’s what I’ve found that’s specific to the A110. I’ve written up these notes in the hope that they’ll be useful to someone else thinking of running Linux on an AAO. While there is a wealth of information about it out on the Internet, it’s not all collected together in one place.

• The 3G unit is an Option GTM380 (USB ID 0af0:7211). SIM card goes in behind the battery in a very strange orientation – connectors facing outwards – but the correct orientation is the only one it will click home in. This is a good card and works well out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. I’m using a “3″ PAYG SIM in it, with the “50p for a day’s Internet” offer, but it’s unlocked for all networks – if 3 isn’t available, I can pop in the SIM from my own phone very quickly.
• The wireless toggle switch on the front works in a slightly unexpected way. When “disabled”, both the 3G and Wifi interfaces still appear to the OS and can be configured – but their radio interfaces appear to be disabled so they can’t communicate.
• The 3G Wifi, sound, webcam, keyboard and synaptics touchpad all worked fine out-of-the-box. There are widespread complaints on the Internet about the poor quality of driver support for the Atheros
  chipset the wifi uses, but it’s fine for me in Ubuntu Karmic.
• The left-hand SecureDigital card slot works as shipped, but the right-hand (multi-card) one is not detected. To fix this, edit the kernel command-line (in /etc/default/grub) and append “pciehp.pciehp_force=1″, then run update-grub2 and reboot.
• The above SD slot fix also fixes suspend; without it, the AAO hangs on resume.
• The SSD is quite a lot slower than a traditional hard disk, but uses less power and is more robust. To compensate for the slowness there are a few things we can do.
  • Mount the root filesystem “noatime”. This stops it from recording the last time every file has been accessed – a functionality few people need. Add “noatime” to the options for “/” in /etc/fstab to do this.
  • By default, Linux tries to combine hard disk activity involvin parts of the disk which are close together. Normally, this is faster because it reduces the amount of (slow) seeking the disk has to do. The SSD is solid-state, so seeking is free – we can get quite a speed-up from disabling this behaviour by adding “elevator=noop” to the kernel commandline. In the new Karmic grub2 this is controlled from
    /etc/default/grub, and you need to run “update-grub2″ after editing it.
  • If you want to take this a bit further, you can reduce the amount of syslog logging, or have syslog log to a tmpfs (memory) filesystem.

• The BIOS will control the internal fan adequately, but it’ll end up turned on quite a lot. It’s pretty quiet, but you can silence it completely by turning it off unless the AAO’s innards are properly warm.
  Beware if you play with this that it may be possible to cause permanent damage to the AAO by overheating if you set these values incorrectly. You may also render your AAO inaccessible by causing it to become just pleasantly warm, which results in your cat going to sleep on top of it.
  • Fetch the “acerhdf” source from http://piie.net/index.php?section=acerhdf; I’m using 0.5.17 with Ubuntu’s 2.6.31 kernel.
  • You’ll need the Ubuntu linux-kernel-headers package installed, and the C compiler & libraries; if you install the “build-essential” package, it depends on everything you’ll need and it’ll all get installed for you.
  • untar, “make” and “make install” the acerhdf module.
  • As of 0.5.17, the module behaves slightly differently to how its README file suggests. What you now need to do is:
    - “modprobe acerhdf verbose=1″
    - Watch the kernel log (dmesg) to see if it’s outputting succesfully
    - If it is, then add the module to your /etc/modules with your desired parameters – I’m using “acerhdf fanon=75 fanoff=70 verbose=1″
    - Enable it by adding a line above the “exit 0″ in your /etc/rc.local: “echo -n “enabled” > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode”. It will then take effect at next reboot
• BIOS flash – if you have anything before v3309, upgrade to get worthwhile fixes (eg to the card readers). Alternatively, Packard Bell and Gateway 2000 both make a model of Netbook which shares hardware with the AAO.I like the Gateway 2000 BIOS because
  • It changes the BIOS logo to a cow-coloured cube.
  • It provides a better choice of screen brightnesses, specifically giving the option of a really low brightness level, which saves battery power and is still ample for low-light conditions.
  • Fetch it from here – note that this probably voids your warranty:
    http://sites.google.com/site/maclesblogspotcom/BIOS/PBG

Useful AAO links

• AAO blog http://macles.blogspot.com/
• AAO Ubuntu pages https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
• AAO forums http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/

Some non-AAO-specific suggestions

• Throw out Firefox and get Google Chrome installed. The Linux version is now more than ready for everyday use.
• If you want remote-control of your Netbook (eg as you configure it), the VNC Server package for the Ubuntu desktop is called “vino”. It’s not installed by default in UNR.
• I strongly recommend removing the “quiet” and “splash” options from the Kernel command line – again in /etc/default/grub. This removes the pretty graphical effects at boot-time, but allows you to see what’s happened if something goes wrong.

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.

This new version of Passenger brings a train-load of NGINX fixes, so our Passenger enabled nginx-brightbox package has been updated too and is available in our testing repository.  More details on using our testing repository here in the 2.2.1 announcement blog post.

The details are on the usual page on our wiki.  If you have any problems or need any help, try our forums.

The new packages depend on new versions of the Ruby rack libraries (not the gem), but this is provided in our repository too and will be automatically installed. You need to install the fastthread gem yourself though.  Our repository provides a few other useful Hardy packages too.

We are only testing our packages against Ubuntu Hardy right now, but they should install and run fine on newer versions of Ubuntu too.

Remember, for maximum memory savings (and speed improvements) try our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages for Ubuntu Hardy (currently only 32bit packages available).

We’re now also providing 64bit versions of the packages (the source of the 404 errors some of you reported when trying to install the package).

Documentation for the packages in the usual place on the wiki.

More Passenger news coming soon :)

Our packages just upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation, which might not be acceptable for everyone.  But it’s simpler than fiddling about with dual Ruby installations.

So, once you’ve added our experimental repository, you’re one command away from getting copy-on-write friendly Ruby EE.  If you don’t like it for some reason, one command gets up back to where you started.

These packages are currently experimental – we’re using them on a few small projects with good results so far, but they’ve not been heavily tested yet.

More details here on our wiki.

So, rather than downloading the sources and compiling yourself, just install from our APT repository.  If you’re on a Brightbox it’s just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sphinx-search


Otherwise you’ll need to configure our repository manually.

We’re of course hoping to get these package accepted upstream at Debian/Ubuntu, so using Sphinx will be easy for everyone.

Happy indexing!

Particularly of note, this fixes a deadlock bug using Passenger and global queueing with the Apache worker mpm.

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

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

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…

Happy birthday Ubuntu!

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.