Slicehost

Datacenter 1 is in the final stages of moving us to a new core network and we’ll be moved this Friday Dec 7 between 0700 and 0900 GMT. There will be a network outage of 5-10 minutes during this window as we are physically moved onto the new network. We’ll be in the chatrooms during the window. As always we apologize for this downtime, but ultimately it should result in a more stable network.

No turkey-day hang-overs at Slicehost. Jared and I have added a couple of new (and oft requested) features over the holiday weekend.

Named Backups

We’ve reworked the backups a bit based on a lot of good feedback. The backup service will now consist of three backup “slots”. If you want daily/weekly scheduled backups those will occupy two of the available slots, leaving a third spot for a backup of your choosing. If you would prefer to not have a daily or weekly, you could opt for additional named backups.

Building New Slices From Backups (AKA cloning)

So let’s say you’ve saved a named backup called “my perfect slice” and would like to be able to crank out a couple of brand new slices based on that image. In the “system image” drop-down on the Add Slice page you’ll notice that you now have an option to select any backups of your other slices for creating new slices. It’s as simple as that. Note that the root password, network configs, and ssh host keys will be regenerated for each install based on a backup.

First one since the big rewrite. It’s short but we give updates on the new backend, new team members, the waitlist and more.

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

Credit cards are the only form of payment we accept and occasionally this causes problems for customers (usually international). Paypal is the most often requested alternative and it looks like they have a new solution that could be of interest to our customers. They are set to announce a virtual credit card product tomorrow which generates a usable Mastercard number that deducts directly from your Paypal account. Initial reports describe this as an installed software package that works with your browser, so compatibility with OS X and Linux remains to be seen. However, it could be a great one-time payment option for folks who’d prefer to setup a Slicehost account without using a credit card.

We’re through all of the 6, 12 and 24 month prepayments and into the longest outstanding reservations (3-months). Moving at a very quick pace, so if you’re still waiting it will be coming your way soon. If you’re just getting onto the list, 6-month and up should be same day sign-up.

Network maintenance will be performed on Friday Nov 16 at our first datacenter from 0600-1100 GMT. Expected impact will be momentary network outages as traffic is migrated to the new core from 0700-1000 GMT. This should be one of the last major maintenance events as we move onto the new core at this facility. We’ll be online during the window. As always, please contact us with any questions.

No nightclubbing for us this Saturday night, instead we completed an emergency maintenance – upgrading firmware in all of our switches to circumvent a bug that started popping up. You shouldn’t have noticed any downtime, this was done between 0500 and 0700 GMT at both datacenters.

A couple of weeks old, but I wanted to mention SysAdmin’s Chronicles extensive review of Slicehost and the new SliceManager . It covers interacting with a Slice and has several great screenshots. A great article for people considering our services.

We’ve been running on our backup connection most of the day. Around 1645 GMT yesterday we failed over and remained there while the NOC researched what happened. At 0800 GMT they will be moving us back over, people may see brief outages as the routes are updated.

Matt Myers has joined Slicehost as our Hardware/NOC guru. He’ll be diving into operational issues such as hardware provisioning, networking and purchasing. Matt lives in St. Louis and will be at the office, so that means Slicehost’s “pants free Fridays” are a thing of the past. Give him a shout in chat or the forums, he goes by SpaceGhost online.

An update to the post yesterday, we realized it’s a hassle for customers to create a new account. Instead, just open a support request with us and we will add the slices for you at another datacenter. SliceManager will handle everything else.

Your prayers to the NOC gods have been answered! Earlier this week we turned up our second facility and started burning through the waitlist once again. What does this mean?

Current customers You won’t notice a difference, SliceManager handles all of this transparently. When you add a slice, it’s kept on the same local network as your other slices for fast communication. If you want to add slices at another facility for redundancy, the best way to currently do this is creating another account. That may change in the future, but we wanted to keep things simple to start. If you’d like to have slices in both facilities, send us an email and we’ll push you through the waitlist.

New customers It’s been a long and painful journey, but things will get better fast. We started tearing through the backlog this week and should get everyone onboard faster than the estimates on the waitlist page. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to tell all the newbies to wait patiently in line!

Future We’re pretty pumped because this is the fruit of several months of labor. These changes allow us to grow easily in both the short and long term. And we can get cracking on some swell stuff we’ve been dreaming up for the past several months.

We just received word of a datacenter maintenance event scheduled this Friday. It will affect most customers, although not those who signed up this week. During the 4-hour window, the service impacting activities are scheduled to occur between 0800-1000GMT.

• routing config changes on core routers
• software updates on core routers
• replacing interface card with a defective port

The expected impact is 3-4 outages of 5 minutes or less. We’ll be monitoring during the window, remember to check status.slicehost.com, slicechat and our twitterstream for updates.

Update

These are the time frames to expect network outages if everything goes as planned:

0800 to 0810 08330 to 0835 0900 to 0910

FYI:

• Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) is available
• Gentoo is now 2007.0
• CentOS is now 4.5 (5 is coming soon)
• Bug fixes for all images

The datacenter network maintenance that caused the outage yesterday was rolled back and will be performed again tonite (Nov 3 0800 GMT). It was supposed to be non-impacting, as is tonite’s maintenance. The Cisco bug that caused the problem has a work around and it will be employed this evening.

We’ll be monitoring things on our end – should there be problems remember to check the chatrooms, Twitter or status.slicehost.com. This maintenance is in preparation for the core cutover scheduled for next week.