Slicehost

As we continue to grow, we strive to offer the awesome support and service for which we are famous. As such, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome the newest member of our Slicehost family:

Purvesh joins us from Michigan and works from our St Louis office. Purvesh is currently completing his initial training this week and will be available soon thereafter to offer his support.

He will be working our third shift with the likes of Josh, Lee and Greg so if you stay up late in the US or get up early in Europe or, er, have a normal day elsewhere, then please do pop in chat and say hello!

While most of us in the United States are already busy filling up on turkey and enjoying quality time with our good friends and family, we wanted to let everyone know that work at Slicehost continues as normal.

Currently, we have Fedora 12 and Gentoo 10.1 images in testing. We'll need some time to run them through the gauntlet, but granted everything goes as expected, we should be able to have those images publicly available shortly.

As always, we will have 24 hour coverage so if you find yourself online, please do drop by SliceChat and show the support team your appreciation.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Mark

Today, we are pleased to announce that a CentOS 5.4 image is now available in the SliceManager for new slices and rebuilds. As such, we will be removing the CentOS 5.2 base image on Wednesday, December 2nd.

Please be aware that after this time, you will not be able to create any new slices or rebuild an existing slice using our base CentOS 5.2 image.

If you experience any issues with the newly available CentOS 5.4 image, please visit us in chat or email us at support@slicehost.com

You know, email can be a tricky thing to set up and run on a Slice. It does need maintenance and it can be a chore for some people.

I think things should be easy so we teamed up with the very nice people at Rackspace Email (at our parent company, Rackspace) to offer an exclusive promotion code which will reduce the minimum monthly commitment from $10 a month to just $3 a month.

Let me explain:

Without the promotion code, the minimum commitment to have Rackspace host and serve all your email needs is $10 a month. However, I know a lot of Slicehost customers are just like me and only want two or three email boxes.

Using the promotion code means my minimum commitment is just $3 a month. For that, I get 3 Rackspace Email mailboxes. That's suits me fine. If I want more, I can add them, one at a time, as I need them, and pay for my usage.

I think this offer is perfect for many of you who just want two or three mailboxes. I hope you take advantage of the famous Rackspace Fanatical Support that Rackspace Email offers. I personally use them for my email needs (and not just because I work for Rackspace!).

Enough! Where is the code?

Log into the Slicemanager and you will see the promo code in the left hand menu. All you need to do is go to the Rackspace Email website and sign up using the promo code.

To help explain the process, Mark (our wonderful Support Manager) has created a couple of articles:

Email article 1 (Initial sign up process)

Email article 2 (Rackspace Email MX Records)

It is worth noting that the signup process will not show the discount. It will still say $10 a month but rest assured, you will only be charged $3 a month (assuming you only use up to 3 mailboxes of course). If you have any concerns once you have signed up, check with Rackspace Email support and they can confirm you have entered the promo code.

They also have a 14 day trial so if you feel icky and don't want to continue, just cancel before the end of the 14 days.

If you have any questions about Rackspace Email I recommend you chat to the great support staff on their website. If you have questions for us at Slicehost, come and chat!.

Paul

UPDATE:

I forgot to add that there is a very convenient DNS Zone creator you may want to use:

Slicehost and RS Email DNS Zone creator

Note that the site is not officially sponsored by Slicehost so YMMV but I think it will save you time and typing.

Paul

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

Until now, if you needed a different kernel for your Slice, you had to enter a ticket. Although the process was quick and relatively painless, we wanted to make things even easier.

We are happy to say that you can now select which kernel you would like for your Slice right from within the Slicemanager. This means there will be no delay in changing the kernel and you can swap them around as you see fit!

We tweaked the Slicemanager display to make things a little easier. Let's see what the Slice information page looks like:

Kernel Selection:

To change the kernel, click the 'kernel' link and then select your preferred version. As noted in the Slicemanager, this will immediately reboot your Slice into the new kernel:

That's it, done.

As always, do come into our chatroom if you have any questions. See you there!

PickledOnion

Our STL-A datacenter provider has a network maintenance window this evening. The window starts Friday, September 18 at 0500 GMT and runs through 1000 GMT. We do not expect any impact and our NOC and support team will be monitoring for problems. Should you encounter any issues, please email support or swing by the chatroom. Thanks!

We like creating stuff. We especially like people who create stuff off their own back.

Today we were honoured to present the Rackspace Cloud 'Einstein Award for Innovation' to a member of Slicehost Support for the work he put into creating and maintaining our public chatroom (http://chat.slicehost.com).

As we grew, the chatroom we were using wasn't really working and we needed a new solution. Josh Kearney, who runs our third support shift, volunteered to look into how we can better communicate. He may not have realised the size of the job when he volunteered but he tackled this project head on and much of the development was done in his spare time.

We can't give Josh enough praise for his effort and determination to see the project through the end and he still continues to improve it.

We also like facts and figures so I reckon we can share this with you:

It took Josh something like 80+ hours dedicated to designing and creating the room.

It allows customers to chat with us, live, from any web browser at any time of the day or night.

it allows us to ban those silly people who seem to want to cause havoc and link to nasty websites.

Customers can paste text and images into the room which can assist when explaining an issue.

We hope you like the chatroom. It's been live for a while now and the feedback has been very positive.

Here's to Josh and innovation!

PickledOnion

Quite a long 3-way Handshake podcast (episode 16) with Jason, Matt, Paul and Sabrina. We have a lot to chat about, not the least of which is big news regarding Matt:

Matt is moving on from Slicehost to pursue other interests. As he says in the podcast, it has been an amazing three years and he wants to try his hand at other opportunities. Although we are sad that Matt has his eye on pastures new, we understand and wish him the best of luck! Matt can still be reach via twitter (@zenmatt) and you can follow his blog (howradical.com)

On a similar note, we talk about Paul (a.k.a. PickledOnion) moving from the UK to San Antonio. This is a big step for Paul and for Slicehost as it allows a lot more interaction with Jason and rest of the crew who work in San Antonio. It also means he can fly to St Louis on a regular basis to visit our Slicehost brethren in our original office.

We answer a bunch of tweets and questions and also tackle the perennial questions of European datacenters and what exactly the differences are between Cloud Servers and Slicehost.

Intro music is Ice Cream Paint Job and outro is Fresh Blood.

We hope you enjoy it and thanks for your continued support.

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

Our STL-A datacenter provider has a network maintenance window this evening. The window starts on Friday at 0500 GMT and runs through 1000GMT. We do not expect any impact and our NOC and support team will be monitoring for problems. Should you encounter any issues, please email support or swing by the chatroom. Thanks!

We have the Slicehost Ops team in from San Antonio (Major, Ant and John) on this short podcast. Topics include bandwidth tweaks, the maintenance events in May and their day-to-day work. Intro Cha Cha Cha from the Go soundtrack, outro is Dirty Robot (Tofu remix). Enjoy!

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

We’ve found that one of our primary switches in the DFW1 datacenter needs to be replaced as soon as possible. The emergency maintenance is planned for this evening at 2AM GMT (9PM CDT) and it should be very brief.

Since our environment has redundant switching, the downtime should only be a matter of seconds. In the worst case scenario, the downtime should be less than 60 seconds. As soon as the switch is successfully replaced, we will provide an update regarding the network’s status.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance and for any inconvenience that it may cause. Thank you for your support!

UPDATE AT 2:45AM GMT: The maintenance is now complete and the switching has been thoroughly tested after the replacement. If you’re experiencing any on-going issues, please contact us at any time.

Just a reminder, tomorrow I’m headed to Velocity and then SF Cloudcamp in the evening. Several Rackspace folks will be at Structure, later in the week. On Thursday night we’re having a Slicehost/Rackspace meetup at the 21st Amendment starting at 6pm. Hope to see you around! Send me an email if you’d like to meet (matt@slicehost.com).