Slicehost

Slicehost was mentioned in an interview with Dmitriy Samovskiy at High Scalability. Dmitriy discusses an article he wrote for Linux Journal, Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN. He proposes using OpenVPN to connect servers in multiple datacenters to minimize downtime and risk. It’s an interesting read for customers looking to ensure availability and pertinent for people running slices in both of our datacenters.

For your listening pleasure, the 3 way handshake episode 8. Myself, Jason and Paul discuss a breaker trip from last week, OpenID in SliceManager, Linux kernel vulnerabilities, new Macbook Pros and iPhones. Intro music is Motivational Speaker by Cut Chemist and exit music is Mercy Me by What Made Milwaukee Famous.

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Jeff from Magnetk sends a $5 off coupon for ExpanDrive, lowering the price to $24. Great tool for Mac users working on their slices.

Coupon code: ZQCGHPX2LEGFLFI6

It’s good for 50 users. Thanks Jeff!

Lot’s of buzz for the new Mac app ExpanDrive. There’s even a plug on the Textmate blog, where folks have been clamoring for a remote editing solution for as long as I can remember. ExpanDrive allows you to mount SFTP servers in finder, making remote work easier. Gruber says:

For many typical tasks, ExpanDrive is far more convenient and seamless than a standalone client like Interarchy or Transmit. You don’t have to worry about uploading or downloading, it works more like a USB flash drive — you just save and open files directly. If you open remote files checked out of an SVN (or other revision control system) repository, you can use the built-in SVN commands in BBEdit or TextMate, just as though the files were part of a repository checked out on your local drive.

And everyone comments on how fast and easy it is to use. If you’ve been working on your Slices’ apps via SFTP, this could be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

Update – Jeff from Magnetk sends a $5 off coupon for Slicehost customers. It’s good for the first 50 users and lowers the price to $24. Coupon code: ZQCGHPX2LEGFLFI6

Jared just turned on OpenID authentication for SliceManager. It was a popular request and should make life easier for those of you already on the OpenID bandwagon. For those of you who aren’t, here’s an explanation:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

We hope you find this useful. As always, let us know if you have questions.

Chris at Summer Daze has created a blog button to show your Slicehosting pride. Check it out here – thanks Chris!

We have two kernels currently deployed: 2.6.18 and 2.6.16.29. 2.6.16 is not vulnerable. If you have 2.6.18, a reboot is required to load the new, patched version. See this forum thread for more details.

As of Friday, January 25, the Slice Manager has the ability to display simple diagnostics for your Slices. It will display whether your Slice and/or host server are up, the load on the host server, and the rate of swap usage (reads and writes per second). Additionally, we’ve added links to allow you to use the Just-Ping service to ping your Slice, or your own internet connection, from over 20 points around the world.

The 3-way handshake episode 7 is ready for your listening pleasure. SuperJared joins us from San Diego. We talk about his role at Slicehost, capistrano articles from Paul, Slicehosters getting dugg, drama in the Rails community and Macworld.

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I’m sure everyone and their brother saw these 2 sites last week, given that they were on digg, reddit, delicious and the Hacker News feed at yCombinator. In case your browser was broken and you missed it:

thesixtyone is an awesome new music site allowing users to vote songs onto the front page. They have a great interface for playing songs instantly. Plus the cool VH1 styke pop-ups keep you entertained. James and Samuel survived a massive digg and had a great week of publicity.

Dominiek also hit the front page of digg with his article Building a .com in 24 hours. He walks through the day long process of building Wigitize and people went nuts over the details and new site. There are even updates during and after the traffic wave describing the experience.

Congrats to thesixtyone team and Dominiek!

People have been asking for waitlist updates: surprise, surprise – it’s been non-existent for over a week! We’re happy to be caught up and hope to stay that way. Prepayments remain in place ranging from 3-12 months. Feel free to snag your slice at will and thanks to those who waited patiently during the previous months.

Happy holidays – our last episode of 2007. Pickled Onion joins us from the UK, a few updates and some banter.

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Datacenter 1 will have a network maintenance window Friday Dec. 14 between 0601-1200 GMT. At this time, BGP configurations will be modified and BGP sessions moved to the new core (which we were physically moved to last week). The expected impact is momentary outages affecting some customers as BGP updates propagate, with most of these changes taking place between 0700-1000 GMT. We’ll be available in the chatroom during the window. As always please contact us with any questions.

We’re working on lots of little things as we close out 2007:

• Today Arch Linux was added to the list of OS options. We’ve received several requests for Arch and it’s a good choice for power users.
• The mobile version of SliceManager has also been updated, be sure to bookmark it for stats gathering and reboots via the road.
• The bandwidth alerts are now emailed when you hit 80% of your Slice’s limit in order to provide lead time.

Today we’ve enabled a few notifications for Slicehosters. These are sent to the customer email addresses, not the billing email addresses.

Swap

The first notification is about swap usage. We’re monitoring pure I/O on each Slice’s swap partition, and if it exceeds our current threshold (subject to change) you’ll receive an email. This will hopefully let you know that the slice is using more swap than it should. This is bad because using excessive swap will degrade performance dramatically. You have a 3-day threshold to rectify the situation before you are emailed again.

We’ll follow up next week with some ways to tackle swap usage on your slice.

Blocklist

This monitor watches the IPs we provide on 2 Spam Blocklists with more to come soon. The email you receive gives a link to the Blocklist website. There you will find information on how to remove your IP(s) from that list.

Bandwidth Overage

You shall receive this notification the day you go over your bandwidth allotment. There is no change in service, but you will be charged an extra $0.30 (USD) per extra gigabyte of transfer.