A scheduled reboot of the Vandrad Research Labs Xen server stack has been successful. All servers appear to have come back on-line without a problem.
The reboot was necessary to update the kernel and to distribute new modules to all Xen hosted instances.
The Debian foundation have announced that as of 6 FEB 2012 they are terminating the ongoing security support for Debian 5.0 aka “Squeeze”. All customers using this release of Debian Linux are requested to upgrade to current stable distribution of Debian Linux – Debian 6.0 aka Debian “Lenny”.
The full text of the advisory can be found here on the Debian news website.
We are planning to upgrade the XEN server stack sometime in the next two weeks.
Unfortunately this process will involve some down-time for all of our hosted clients.
The upgrade will take the current servers from XEN 3 series hypervisor to a XEN 4 series hypervisor and upgrade the underlying Linux kernel to the current Debian 6 provided versions. As part of the upgrade process we will distribute the new kernel modules to all XEN virtual servers.
The upgrade is driven by the desire to take advantage of the improvements that XEN 4 series hypervisors bring in terms of performance CPU, I/O and RAM and to enable some of the more stable and faster virtual devices and associated management features.
We will be contacting our hosted clients over the next few days to work out the best time for the outage .
One of our clients, the Ancient Arts Fellowship have requested a new Plone site.
After some deliberation and several futile attempts to upgrade their current Plone 2.5.5 to a plone 3.x instance we made a collective decision to run with a new Plone 4 setup.
Of course the “curse of the time zone” reared its ugly head and bit us on the bum.
the “Curse of the Time Zone” arises when (for reasons historic and political) there is a collsion between the GNU/Linux timezone names and those expected by zope/Plone framework. This happend because the GNU/Linux servers call Australian and US time zones “EST” and “EDT”… while zope/plone stack calles them AEDT, AEST for Australia and EDT and EST for USA.
Ultimately the solution is to set a timezone variable inside of the Zope framework to take care of the differences, but that problem is what to call it… Australia/Canberra and Australia/Sydney did not work . But after a few searches and trial and error we found this magic string “AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3″ it seems to work.
so the process is:
environment-vars =
TZ AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3
I am very happy to report, that just as just as was described in the PostgreSQL update post the same process works flawlessly for migrating postgresql 8.3.x to 8.4.x on Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0)
An outage is required to activate linux kernel patches as detailed in DSA 2153-1 -linux-2.6 security update.
Current schedule is for 22:30 to 23:00 on AEDT on Tuesday 01/02/2011
Service will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes
Outage Advisory 2010-11-30 20:00 to 20:30 AEDT.
A scheduled server maintenance outage will take place between 20:00 and 20:30 AEDT on 30/11/2010.
We expect that the actual service interruption will take about 10 minutes
because a reboot of the server is required.
Vandrad Research Labs are proud to announce that together with Mr Dale Baldwin of dalebaldwin.com we have launched a new web services and hosting joint venture to support Dale and his growing web design and consultancy business based out of Hobart in Tasmania.
Recently Mr Baldwin has advised that this arrangement has allowed him to close two deals in a very short period of time. Excellent work Dale, and we look forward to having our inaugural customers on board very shortly.
We did some system accounting last night – we only have 6 more static IP addresses left.
We still have reasonable amount of RAM and a lot CPU cycles and several hundred gigabytes of HDD space in reserve but we can only cater for 6 more dedicated Xen Linux servers, and two of those are currently reserved for existing projects (one server is being built, with another server order expected soon).
This means I am in position to offer only 4 more dedicated Xen Linux servers and after that we are at capacity as far as provisioning of new Xen Linux systems on our main hosting system.
If you are looking for a server to host your websites, blogs, email or e-commerce, look us up at VandradLabs. I am sure we can come up with a hosting solution that suits your needs.
We have ordered more RAM for our hosting servers. This will allow us to host more clients and provide mode dedicated resources per client on each server.