Slicehost

Want Ruby on Rails goodness for your Slice in less than 5 minutes? Checkout the 5-minute Rails Install on our Wiki. Enjoy!

The guy behind the Ruby on Rails podcasts (topfunky) has started a unique service called Peepcode. Every month, he releases a video tutorial, usually about an hour long, that costs $9. Honestly, when I first read the announcement, I thought it sounded novel, but couldn’t imagine myself using it. I skipped the first episode on RJS templates. But when the second episode came out, covering Textmate Basics, I bit. I’ve been longing for a quick tutorial exposing me to some of the more advanced Textmate features and hoped this would be it.

All I can say now? What a fantastic idea! I highly recommend this service – excellent quality, quite effective and reasonably priced. I wasn’t sure if a video would help me “learn”, as I tend to be more of the book type, but it was a neat experience. I’m looking forward to future releases. And hats off to Topfunky for a fresh approach. RoR, despite our feelings, is still bleeding edge. A video tutorial is a fast, effective way to keep people abreast of the latest and greatest. And an order of magnitude advantage over dead tree competitors.

By popular demand, Gentoo 2006.1 is now available as a distribution choice. One warning, if you’re rebuilding/adding/creating a Slice, it does take longer than the others (about 90 seconds) to create – so please be patient. Next – we’ll be working on OpenBSD, which after Gentoo is a popular request.

We now handle the RDNS zones for our IP blocks. Turn around should be much faster – if you submitted a previous request, it has been completed.

First – an apology to all of our customers. We experienced 30 minutes of downtime today, around 1pm. That’s unacceptable and we’re working hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

• 1245 CST: Slicehoster Matt T. pops into the chatroom and asked if he was the only one who couldn’t reach his box. I sarcastically responded yes, about 15 seconds before our phones started beeping and the alarms sounded. Predictably, all heck broke loose.

• 1247 CST: I call the NOC. We recently doubled bandwidth, but were having trouble seeing the increase on our side. A NOC engineer was plugged into our backbone switch to investigate. I take off in a sprint for the NOC (tall programmers are not the most graceful runners), while Jason and others man the phone/chatroom to relay updates.

• 1252 CST: Huffing and puffing, I arrive at the NOC to discover the backbone router is off. Engineer admits he may have bumped it or maybe it failed. Power is cycled. But this doesn’t look good, a bump shouldn’t put a router on the fritz.

• 1257 CST: After a few failed reboot attempts, it becomes apparent something else is very wrong. More investigation via the console points to a memory problem. We reseat all of the memory in the device.

• 1307 CST: More reboot attempts after reinstalling the router lead nowhere. Cutover to emergency backup device which requires upstream changes.

• 1315 CST: Everything is back online.

• The router did indeed have a bad memory chip. This prevents it from booting. A replacement is on the way.
• HSRP, scheduled for later this month, was not yet in place. This falls on us.

Again, we aplogize for the outage, it should not have happened. Something got fried and we didn’t have the proper failovers in place. This will be remedied soon. In the meantime, everyone is back online and there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference. And the network should feel faster ;). Please contact us with any questions and thanks again for your support and words of encouragement in the chatroom.

Every Slicehoster can appreciate this.

Random updates for Slicehosters:

• We’re working on taking control of our Reverse DNS. Currently we have to go upstream for requests which is taking a bit longer than we hoped. The process should be fixed this week (at least we hope).

• We’re working on allowing customers to purchse extra IP’s or storage space.

• The forums now support RSS/Atom feeds.

The referrals program is in effect. We decided on using email addresses for the referral code, to be referenced during the signup process. This seemed good because we figured people might not sign-up right away after reading a site or blog post. However, some are now asking for referral codes to pass via URL, so we’ll get started on that too.

Current customers – check the Accounts tab in SliceManager. Have people reference your email address during the sign-up process and after 90days your account will be credited. Enjoy!

Hurray – we have opened the doors! A big thanks to all of our early testers. Please contact us with any questions – we’re here for you. Enjoy.

Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.

—Things you might not know about Bruce Schneier

A lot of new customers are asking how much longer. Soon!. We made some network changes this weekend to accomodate the increased demand and are polishing off the management interface. This short delay will be worth it in the long run for everyone in terms of performance. And a big thank you to our beta customers for putting up with the quirks.

We’re almost ready – a new batch of machines arrives today! In the meantime, here are a few quick snapshots of the management interface, which a people have been asking for.

Perform a reboot:

Or send us a message – we hate tickets too:

Who loves Apple? Then you’ll be interested in the new Xserve. And you might want to let us know because as Apple lovers ourselves, we’re considering Xserve hosting packages.

Our favorite framework turns 3.

So for my (delayed) celebration of Rails turning two years old, I salute all early adopters who dared stick their neck out and be the subject of ridicule from their suspicious peers.

Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake.

This looks cool.

I’ve got a modified Solaris miniroot with ZFS functionality which takes up about 60 MB (The compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB). Solaris boots entirely into RAM. From poweron to full functionality, it takes about 45 seconds to boot on a very modest 1GHz Cyrix Mini ITX motherboard.