Slicehost

I am very pleased to announce the start of some major changes and improvements to the Slicehost product.

2010 is going to be a very exciting year for us and I hope you will join us for an amazing year.

New Slice Sizes

Let's start with the new Slice sizes. Although upgrading a Slice is done with a click of a button and is usually complete within a few short minutes, one of the issues was having to double the Slice size. For example, from a 256Slice, the next available option was a 512Slice. This can mean a significant jump in resources and in how much you pay each month.

So to help with a smoother, more consistent upgrade path we are very pleased to offer our new 'Intermediate Slices'. They sit nicely between our most popular Slice sizes. We have introduced a 384Slice, a 768Slice, a 1.5GB Slice and a 3GB Slice.

The prices of the new Slices will also allow for an easier resize path - the new Slices start at just $25.

Bandwidth Increases

As you may know, we have pooled bandwidth across Slices since Sep 2008 but what if you don't have multiple Slices? Well, we agree you shouldn't have to worry about bandwidth overages so we have significantly increased the bandwidth usage for each Slice size.

You can view full details for all of the plans on offer on the main website: http://www.slicehost.com

Professional Services

There are also many requests from customers who would like help in setting up their Slice(s). Although there are many very able techs in the community who have done an outstanding job, we wanted to make this easier by offering another option. As such, we will also be introducing Rackspace Professional Services later this week. This allows you to hire professional, Rackspace Linux Sysadmins and Techs to install whatever you like on your Slice. Want a multi-Slice, load balanced, Nginx setup? No problem. Want a simple LAMP stack? No problem.

I hope you find this start to the Slicehost 2010 useful. Keep an eye out, a lot more is coming!

Cheers, Paul

A new kernel version, 2.6.32, is now available through the SliceManager to install on your slice. Please be aware that the process does require a reboot to complete.

This kernel has been fully tested to work on all of the images we provide. With that said, you will notice one small caveat in regards to the memory reporting of your slice.

As many of you are aware, we do use the kernels provided straight from the developers at Ubuntu. However, it seems there is a bug in the recent kernel that appears to provide your slice with a few more megabytes than you would come to expect. This is a purely cosmetic issue and does not effect the actual performance of the slice itself.

As always, if you run into issues or have any concerns, please visit us in SliceChat or send an email to support@slicehost.com.

As many of you with Slices in our Rackspace DFW Datacenter are painfully aware, there was a power outage in the early hours of Tue, 3rd Nov.

Firstly, it goes without saying that I personally apologise for the outage and I want to explain what happened. Although this will not change your experience, I hope it will go some way to easing concerns about a repetition of last night.

Secondly, it has taken much of today for me to get accurate information. For those that know me, you know I am a straight talker (to say the least) and I wanted facts before I approached you with details.

So, what happened?

At around 12:29am CST this morning, the DFW data center experienced a power outage during a routine (non impacting) maintenance. Clearly, this non-impacting maintenance became impacting and many Slicehost customers in the DFW DC experienced downtime.

Power was restored within five minutes and most Slices were up and running in a good timeframe. However, some of you did experience lengthy delays while we restored your Slice. We had the Systems team working from the moment we knew something had occurred and they did not stop until everyone was up and running again.

The issue was further complicated by internal DNS issues which were caused by the unexpected power outage.

However, this does bring up a couple of specific points I would like to discuss:

We did not post a notice about this maintenance. Until now, we have restricted notification of maintenance windows to those that might, under normal circumstances, have an impact. We didn't expect this period to be impacting and so we did not post a notice.

This turned out to be very wrong and, as a result of this, I will be posting more routine maintenance warnings on our status blog.

The second point is that I feel our communication lacked in a couple of areas. We did not keep you informed as regularly as we should have done. Even if there was no specific news, I feel regular updates are essential so you know we are dealing with the issue. I have already changed our procedures and there is a clearer, more defined, route for communication.

I make no excuses for what happened. It reflects on us badly and it affected you negatively. This is not something I find acceptable and I will continue to work to provide the best service for you.

I know you will be concerned and if you have any questions then please email us or come to our chatroom.

Paul

Wow. We've had a mad 24 hours but we are very pleased to announce we have a shiny new Ubuntu Karmic Koala Slice image up and running.

If you want to try it, then log into the (Slicemanager) and fire up a new Slice or you could rebuild your current Slice with a fresh Koala image (remember a rebuild will wipe the Slice though!).

The kernel issues we talked about yesterday have been solved by the wonderful Systems Team. If you happen to be in our IRC lounge (Freenode, #slicehost) then do send a wave of thanks to RackerHacker and Ant. They have worked their little socks off on this one and have done a great job.

I think you know we don't recommend upgrading a distro from the command line but, hey, if you want to, then the latest kernel will allow you to do just that.

For those that do decide to go the command line route, then you will want to upgrade the kernel, via the Slicemanager, before you upgrade the distro. Good luck!

Thanks for your patience and support while we sorted out the kernel issues. It goes without saying (although I'll just go ahead and say it anyway) that if you have any issues then let us know. The best ways of getting in touch are to open a ticket via the Slicemanager or to join us in our chatroom 24/7.

Cheers, Paul

IMPORTANT NOTICE - PLEASE READ:

Ubuntu is our most popular distro and we expect a keen uptake once Karmic Koala is released tomorrow (29th Oct 2009).

However, I wanted to take this chance to give you a warning that you should wait to upgrade your Ubuntu Slice, via the command line, until we have a kernel that works with the new release. We are working hard behind the scenes to make sure there will be a working, reliable kernel but it may take us a few days to get this ready.

If you do upgrade via the command line, then your Slice WILL NOT boot!

To recover your data you will need to enter rescue mode and transfer your data.

PLEASE BE WARNED!

We are working hard to get a viable release out as soon as possible and you should wait until we have an official Ubuntu Karmic Koala distro before attempting to upgrade your Slice by hand. As an aside, we never recommend upgrading a Slice via the command line anyway.

If you have any questions or concerns then please do send us an email (support@slicehost.com) or open a ticket via the Slicemanager (under the Help tab) or come and chat to us, 24/7, in our chatroom.

Thanks for your patience and we will get a working Ubuntu Karmic Koala out as soon as we possible can.

Paul.

UPDATE:

Thursday, 29th Oct 2009:

So we have a working kernel and we are going to be abusing it pretty hard over the next 24 hours to make sure it comes up to Slicehost standards!

We hope to get it out tomorrow (Fri, 30th Oct) afternoon, US Central time.

Any changes and I'll let you know.

Cheers, Paul

We’re making some planned infrastructure changes during the month of May. The first of these changes involve our namerservers: ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net. Currently ns1 and ns2 are located in STL-A, ns3 is offsite. Next week, ns1 will move to DFW, ns2 will move to STL-B and ns3 will remain offsite. An outline of what’s taking place next week is below.

DATE: Tuesday May 5

EVENT: We’ll be changing the slicehost.net authoritative DNS records with our registrar.

IMPACT: The only people affected by this event will be those who have hardcoded our nameserver IPs into applications or configuration files (instead of using ns1/ns2/ns3). It’s atypical to hardcode IPs, but we understand people have their reasons. If you did hardcode the IPs, we recommend changing them ASAP to ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net.

DATE: Saturday May 9 0400-0430 GMT

EVENT: Backend changes on our DNS application.

IMPACT: During this window, customers using our nameservers will be unable to modify their records.

If you have any questions about the planned events above, please get in touch with our support team. We have another event tentatively scheduled for May 22, a blog post explaining these changes will be posted in a week or so. Thank you!

This is a precautionary notification that the local power company will be working on the community service feed for the STL-B data-center building from 0500-1200 GMT on Nov 6. During this window, we will be off utility power and running on generator power. There will be multiple representatives on hand from the power company, the building operations group, our data-center and Slicehost. We do not expect any customer impact during this window but wanted to relay the notification we received. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Related power maintenance in STL-B from July

This is a precautionary notification that the local utility company will be working on the community service feed for the STL-B data-center building from July 23 0400 GMT – July 24 0100 GMT). During this window, we will be off utility power and running on generator power. There will be multiple representatives on hand from the utility company, the building operations group, our data-center and Slicehost. We do not expect any customer impact during this window but wanted to relay the notification we received. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

UPDATE:

No issues thus far, but they have extended the maintenance window an additional 7 hours with plans to resume usage of the community power feed at July 24 0800 GMT.

UPDATE:

All done. Smooth as silk.

The blog has been a little quiet as of late, but we've been busy working on several updates.

CentOS Updated

CentOS was recently updated to version 5.2, now available for new Slices and rebuilds. (If you want to upgrade an existing CentOS installation you'll have to do so using the standard CentOS upgrade path.)

Newer Kernels

We have added support for newer 2.6.24 derived kernels. Currently all new slices are built with these kernels, if you'd like to update any existing slice, let us know via a support request.

SliceManager Security Updates

We've been hard at work on the SliceManager, fixing bugs and adding features. Community feedback has been an invaluable resource, notably in a recent discussion in the SliceForum regarding SliceManager security. We have several options on the table, most of which are still under discussion, but we decided to push out a couple of simple ones right away:

• Notify me on SliceManager login failures
• Send Slice root password via email

These can be found under Accounts > Security Preferences. Additionally, we now only allow up to 3 login failures in 30 minutes, significantly reducing the possibility of a brute force break-in to your SliceManager account.

Several updates and features are on the horizon, so stay tuned. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment, forum post, email, or drop by our chat.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.