An update from Oracle on the state of MySQL, which most of our clients run some version of. As Edward states, it’s rather ubiquitous.

Bitpusher has made a strategic decision to begin recommending and using XFS in lieu of JFS in most cases. This is a tentative decision but also a significant shift, not one we take lightly.

We have had a pretty good but not great experience with JFS over the past 18+ months.

Now RedHat has shown movement towards official adoption of XFS (and also ext4) but not for JFS.

Our strategy must support the major Linux distros (most of our clients run CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu or Debian), and since XFS and JFS are both equal “cousins” on the Debian/Ubuntu side of things it just makes sense to prefer XFS. ext4 is still a bit immature for our taste.

Furthermore, various performance benchmarks including this one generally give both high rankings
We will implement this strategy through attrition rather than by any kind of forced retrofit.

One of our clients tipped me off to this awesome ssh configuration to create dynamic tunnels to servers which would otherwise be hidden behind NAT or a firewall. The mechanism uses a bastion host as a proxy combined with netcat.

Example snippet from .ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config…

Host example-gw
Hostname <ip-address>

Host  *.example.com
  ProxyCommand ssh example-gw exec 'nc %h %p' 2>/dev/null

Combine this with ssh keys and (something like) keychain/pageant/ssh-agent and accessing the systems at a remote site becomes oh so easy!

Red Hat and it’s variants have a nasty habit of installing 32-bit packages on a 64-bit platform like x86_64. See the output from uname -a to be sure, before proceeding.

Here is a one-liner that can be used (AT YOUR OWN RISK) to remove the offending packages. It has been my experience that this is generally safe to do.

rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n' | grep i.86$ | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

Also, adding this to /etc/yum.conf will prevent 32-bit packages from creeping back in.

exclude=kernel* *.i.86

To our valued customers, colleagues, friends and fans.

This post should help to clarify our support policy. There often seems to be some misunderstanding about how responsive we (BitPusher) will be during the weekend or evening hours.

BitPusher staff is normally in-office from about 7am to 6pm US/Pacific time, Monday through Friday. We don’t monitor the incoming tickets on a 24×7 basis which means that normal requests (e-mail or phone) generated outside of those “normal business” hours (and sometimes within depending on how busy we are which as of late is VERY) will be handled the next business day. By handled I mean seen, assigned, scheduled and/or started.

If you need urgent support (24×7 day or night) call the support hotline (1-888-9PUSHER) and choose URGENT support. You will either be connected directly to a technician or be prompted to leave a voicemail. If the latter, a pager alert will go to the on-call technician who  should respond within 1 hour. Most of the time we’ll respond much quicker, within just a few minutes.

Any questions can be posted to comments here.

Mark Foster
Sr. Systems Engineer

Hostingcon was an absolute success this year. Daniel and I had a great time overall and met a lot of great people. We had a chance to catch up with old friends and partners and met some new ones.

Hostingcon was definitely an eye-opener this year, there are a number of exciting changes about to transform the hosting industry. Over the next two years are definitely going to be a whirlwind of change for the industry. We’re in for a barrage of new cloud hosting and storage services coming at us from mid-sized dedicated-server & hosting companies.

As usual, I spent too much time behind the lens, so I thought I’d post a photo or two.

Daniel & Michael will be attending HostingCon in Washington DC from Saturday August 8th through Thursday August 14th to connect with our existing partners, and meet with new ones. If you’re going to be at the conference, please look us up, we’ll have a few special promo items to hand out for the occasion.

As promised, here are the slides from my presentation at LinuxFest Northwest 2009 entitled “Tame Your Infrastructure with Puppet.” Enjoy!

Since I’ve spent the better part of the weekend trying to get this work, I thought that I should share. Later I will post a more thorough description for preparing fully automated Ubuntu installations using preseeding, but for now, here’s the hard part.

If you’ve found this blog posting via google, then you’ve probably read all of the unhelpful forum posts, IRC chat transcripts (some of which I’m involved in), and mailing list posts about this. Yes, the documentation says that it is possible to setup Software Raid via preseeding, and even gives you some working preseed stanzas to do it. What the Documentation fails to admit,is that the package required to achieve this feat, partman-auto-raid, is not actually included with the Ubuntu netboot installer.

Never worry, for whenever you expect an elegant bit of pre-planned infrastructure to solve a problem, you end up with a dirty hack. This is no exception.

What you need to do is download partman-auto-raid_7_all.udeb from the Ubuntu Universe pool, and install it. The trick is to install it before the installer looks at your recipes. This is achieved with the partman/early_command hack:

d-i partman/early_command string \
/usr/bin/wget -O /tmp/raid.udeb \
 ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/partman-auto-raid/partman-auto-raid_7_all.udeb \
  && udpkg -i /tmp/raid.udeb

With Great Thanks to Brent Chapman from Netomata , the complete and working preseed example including the ugly hacks required to partition software raid volumes are posted below. Note, there’s still one bug I haven’t ironed out yet which adds an annoying manual step. After the installer finishes partitioning, it will falsely complain about not being able to reread the partition table, with this error:

“The kernel was unable to re-read the partition table on /dev/md0 (Invalid argument).
 This means Linux won’t know anything about the modifications you made until you reboot.
 You should reboot your computer before doing anything with /dev/md0.”

If anybody knows how to suppress this error,  please let me know.  Below is the complete preseed file.

 Read the rest of this entry »

SoftLayer and BitPusher invite our customers, partners and friends in the industry to join us for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at Bar 888 in the Intercontinental Hotel, one block away from Moscone Center on the Wednesday of the Web 2.0 Expo.

Booking is through Eventbrite

Thank you to Adaptec for sponsoring the drinks and food.

The EventBrite RSVP page is Here