Steve Kemp's Blog

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Whilst breasts are everywhere I find it highly inappropriate for people to link to videos of them on Planet Debian.

I'd comment to that effect upon your post but I'm getting a 500 error from your server.

In other news Joey Hess reminded me this evening that it is pretty much the 1 year anniversary of my Xen Hosting setup.

In the next few days, once I've checked dates and looked to see if we can upgrade, etc, I'll be requesting payment from those people who wish to continue.

A year ago I setup a xen hosting platform, because I was selfish and wanted a lot more resources than I could otherwise buy within my budget.

At that time I managed to setup a system which gave 7 users 256Mb of memory, 10Gb of disk space and 3 IP addresses all for £11.50 a month, or £138 a year.

On the first anniversary I've managed to increase those resources such that our users can now have:

• 40Gb of disk space (x4!)
• 512Mb of memory (x2!)

All for the same price.

One user decided to buy two accounts upon the machine, so that he could have a combined 512mb+20Gb account, and as the resources have increased this year this is no longer required - so we have a space free for one more user.

Last year several people asked for accounts and I had to reject them - I don't want to be a hosting company I just want to have enough users to fill a machine so that I can be selfish and get a higher spec for myself!

So if anybody who asked last year is still looking for cheap hosting there will be one space at the given spec and price available from this coming Friday / Saturday. (Unfortunately I must insist upon a years payment in advance.)

Uptime last year was good I can recall two reboots with minimal notice, which is reasonable enough I think. You'll get as much support as I can offer, my mobile number, and a clean install of any Debian derived distribution.

(The xen-shell package was developed for this service last year, and allows you to reboot your machine remotely, manage reverse DNS, and connect to the serial console if you break your networking. You'll be able to use that over SSH.)

Please comment if you're interested - If there are more people interested I guess I'll work though the list in order of comments until somebody commits to paying.. Questions welcome,.

TODO: Update website, get great testimonials about my "service" ;)

Update: Space gone.

Xen Migration

This afternoon I mostly migrated Xen guests from their old host to their new. (As part of a an upgrade of facilities. Upgrading in place would have been much fiddlier and more annoying!)

The migration took almost three hours, which was longer than anticipated but shorter than I'd feared. In the future I'll know to do it differently, but I managed to script it fairly well after the first couple were done manually.

Everything appears to be working correctly so I will soon nip out for some high quality beer.

One thing that I wanted to do with the new host was track bandwidth usage upon a per-guest basis.

This should be possible with something like vnstat - however solutions counting traffic by interface name are not a good mesh with Xen - since by default a guest will have an interface with a name like 'vif20.0' - and no means of mapping that to a specific guest.

Each of my guests has been allocated three IPs which are defined like this in the Xen configuration file:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

This works prefectly.

This also works:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo 1.2.3.5 1.2.3.6' ]

Unfortunately anything else I've tried to give each IP a static interface name fails. I've seen reports of this online but no solutions.

Given a configuration file like this the Xen guest doesn't receive any traffic upon the second + third address:

vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,vifname=foo1',
        'ip=1.2.3.5,vifname=foo2',
        'ip=1.2.3.6,vifname=foo3' ]

Any suggestions welcome.

For future reference:

• Xen-Hosting.org: Outage record.

I will ensure this is kept up to date.

(Prompted by an unscheduled outage which I'm really annoyed about!)

Two years ago I started running the xen-hosting.org setup, offering Xen hosting for 7 people for a reasonable price. (Basically to subsidise my own desire to have a big guest and not pay too much for it)

At that time I was charging £11.50 for a Xen guest with 256Mb of memory and 10Gb of disk space.

Each year since then we've managed to increase the spec. For the same price.

Two years on this means I'm now hosting 7 Xen guests with 1Gb of memory, and 40Gb of disk space, for that same price of £11.50 a month. Nice to see how things can improve as time goes on :)

In other news - It is just past our two year anniversary.

Thanks to the people who said nice things about the DNS blacklist I setup the other day.

I suffered a couple of DNS-problems earlier in the day, but things should be back up and running for good now. I hope.

The ultimate cause was using ":" not "&" records with tinydns. Sigh.

ObFilm: Teenwolf