Slicehost

Today we’re pleased to announce a long overdue feature – private IPs for customers with multiple slices. Those of you load-balancing across slices, employing a database cluster/server or syncing between slices will find this option perfect for inter-slice communication. Most importantly, bandwidth on private interfaces will not be metered and therefore does not count toward your per slice transfer limits. We hope this makes life a bit easier for our larger customers using several slices with lots of chatter. Private IPs can be obtained by opening a support issue and there is no charge. We’re looking forward to everyone’s feedback!

A new slicehoster joined our team today – Chris MacGown. He comes from a web and sysadmin background and we are pumped to bring him aboard. Like all of us, he’ll have his hands in everything. You’ll find him in SliceChat and answering emails soon. He’s in STL and brings a crucial vote to the occasional lunchtime standoff between Jason and I (Quizno’s vs. Subway). Stop by soon and give him a shout!

Today we are updating the API with a few features that have been asked for repeatedly. The first feature is the ability to create or rebuild slices from backups.

• API documentation

We have also enabled the ability to destroy slices, but you must enable that ability from the SliceManager, which you may also disable at any time as well.

We've set a user-definable limit of maximum # of slices built in a day, which can be a safeguard against an accidental infinite loop.

Slices also have a number of new attributes:

• Status
• Bandwidth Usage
• All IPs associated
• Progress (when building, rebuilding, etc)

Backward Compatibility

We strive to make each release of the API as backwards-compatible as possible, however there is one small change you may have to make for your Slice models to work.

If you're using Ruby's ActiveResource::Base class, Slices now require an Address class. Since we include one or more IP addresses in an array, ActiveResource requires that it have it's own class. You can simply add on line though:

class Address < String; end

Since the IP addresses are nothing more than strings, this is the easiest way to use them.

It’s been a while since our last podcast! Jason, Paul and I discuss the power maintenance, SliceManager and general updates, the upcoming Slicehost Summit and more. Intro music “In the Beginning” by K’naan, exit music “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. Recorded yesterday afternoon.

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

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.

The facelift continues! Pickled Onion rolled out newly designed versions of his world famous articles site and our network status page. We think you’ll find them more inline with the main site’s look and feel.

In the last podcast, we mentioned our new office and getting some pictures online. Shame on me for taking so long, but we now have a Slicehost Flickr account with a sampling of our new digs. It’s not quite finished, but we’re getting there!

Lukas Biewald has an awesome post up on his rather adventurous weekend. He woke up Sunday morning to find his site, Facestat, on the front page of Yahoo picked up from an earlier link in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve been hit by Digg and Slashdot before, but this spike in traffic was like nothing I’d ever seen.

He goes on to explain how the Facestat team handled the situation and the frantic day spent readying more servers. We spoke with them Sunday evening as they were working. Our hats are off to them, excellent job handling a huge traffic wave and lots of pressure.

Slicehost has scaled up as fast as we’ve needed them to.

Link

Slicehost's 2 year anniversary is approaching and it's been a wild ride. We are proud of how much we've grown and the incredible community that has sprung up around our service. Recently we passed the 10,000 slice milestone and decided to use the opportunity to share some interesting metrics.

High level stats

Active Slices >10,000
Raw Storage >600TB
Active Customers >8,500
60% US, 40% International from 92 countries
16,500 domains hosted

SliceManager stats (last 6 months):

12,190 Slice rebuilds
293,370 Slice backups taken
2,697 Slice resizes performed
1,088 Slice root password resets
3,202 Support tickets answered
14,994 SliceManager requested reboots

Community stats:

Facebook group >500 members
Freenode IRC channel 2,239 unique nicks since inception
23,000 unique visitors per month to articles.slicehost.com
155,000 page views per month at articles.slicehost.com
11,140 forum comments
828 twitter followers

Since we first unveiled the API, we have had excellent feedback and suggestions from many of our users. The first release only had support for DNS zones and records, which, as our clamoring customers let us know, was not enough!

So today, I am pleased to announce version 1.3 of the API which includes support for creating, rebooting, and rebuilding Slices. This will allow for quick and easy deployment, taking us another step in the direction of user-specified automation.

This is the first step to adding Slices to the API, which brings along several caveats:

• Slices cannot be deleted using the API
• OS Images available are currently only public images; you cannot yet build or rebuild from backups

Also note that the charges for new Slices are prorated the same as in the SliceManager.

The future of the API will is dependent on the feedback we receive; What is most important to you? Please let us know how we can improve our service, and we will do our best to make it possible.

A vulnerability exists in many versions of the Debian OpenSSL library that produces predictable keys.

What you should do if you are running Debian or Ubuntu

If you are running any version of Debian or Ubuntu, you should install the patched version of the openssl package and regenerate any cryptographic keys or certificates that were built using the old version. Updates also exist for related packages that blacklist use of known bad keys.

Ubuntu OpenSSL advisory

Ubuntu OpenSSH advisory

Ubunty OpenVPN advisory

Debian OpenSSL advisory

Note that simply updating the packages is not sufficient to patch this issue, you will need to actively replace any and all keys that are vulnerable.

A test for vulnerability can be downloaded here

To update an existing slice-

Debian
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade && aptitude dist-upgrade

Ubuntu 7.10 & 8.04
aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade && aptitude full-upgrade

What you should do if you are running any other distro

Due to the way your slice is initially built, other distro's that are not directly vulnerable may have weak ssh host keys. We would recommend regenerating all slice host keys at this time, which would look something like this-

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_[rd]sa_key
ssh-keygen -t dsa -N "" -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Note that only the 2 host keys on non-deb/ubuntu slices would potentially be affected.

Our Debian and Ubuntu base installs are updated to fix this issue. Any slices built after Wed May 14 GMT 17:00 are already patched.

For questions and comments please use this forum thread

Recorded last Friday for your listening pleasure. We introduce Tony Dolan, discuss mod_rails, a new Ubuntu image, our new office, Jason’s memristor lust and Yahoo-Microsoft. Intro music is What’s the Altitude (Cut Chemist) and exit music is Ghost (Neutral Milk Hotel).

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

Remember when getting a rails app running took 4 cans of Redbull and an afternoon of googling? Ahh the good old days. Over on our articles site, Paul has new tutorials up on installing mod_rails and using it to serve your app. Should take you all of 2 minutes. Kids today have it so easy.

Paul prepared the 8.04 LTS (Hardy) images last night. If you’ve been waiting for the latest version of Ubuntu, it’s available now for new slices and rebuilds. Enjoy!

Most of you are familiar with Pickled Onion’s famous articles and tutorials site. Wanting to hit some topics in greater detail, he’s been working on ebooks designed for those new to the Slicehost community. The first batch covers SliceManager:

• Slicehost Account Creation and Login
• Slicehost Account Management
• Slice Administration
• SliceManager DNS Administration

We hope those of you using our services for the first time find these books helpful. Please let us know what you think and send ideas for more topics. And a big cheer for Pickled Onion who put these together!