One of our customers this evening mailed us to report that he’d upgraded Ubuntu on his colocated server and it had gone wrong. The machine refused to boot, and he’d managed to wipe out the serial settings in his grub configuration so he couldn’t alter the boot line in the configuration to add rootdelay=30. Could we help?

With a bit of fiddling, we could. On bootup the machine dropped out into busybox in the initrd.

ls /dev/mapper/system-system

revealed that the device for the lvm root volume was missing.

lvm vgchange -a y system

activated the root partition inside LVM so we could see it in /dev/mapper

fstype /dev/mapper/system-system

revealed the filesystem to be xfs

modprobe xfs
mkdir /mnt
mkdir /mnt/root
cd /mnt
mount /dev/mapper/system-system root

mounted the root filesystem inside of busybox.

modprobe ext3
mount /dev/sda1 root/boot

mounted the /boot partition

cd root
./usr/bin/vim.tiny boot/grub/menu.lst

brought up a minimal vim editing the grub configuration. I could then add the serial console lines,

serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=15 serial console

to the grub config and rootdelay=30 to the kernel line, reboot and the machine came up.

If this is the sort of thing you could have figured out yourself, we’re always happy to accept CVs at our jobs page. If this scares you we’d suggest you’d be interested in our managed hosting where we do these bits for you.

At a customer request we’ve added a programmatic API for updating DNS records stored with our primary DNS servers. This is immediately available for all customers with a domain purchased from us at no extra charge. You can see the instructions on our support pages under Primary DNS API.

We’re now peering with Google over Lonap.

On Sunday I dropped in at the Debian Barbeque and provided a firkin of Pegasus from the Milton Brewery. Thanks to all the Debian developers for their hard work and have a pint on us.

We’re pleased to announce that as a result of tonight’s connectivity changes our core network, all four data centres now have IPv6 connectivity available. In the next weeks we’ll be contacting all our peering partners to enable direct IPv6 peerings where possible to improve our IPv6 connectivity.

If any customers would like to enable IPv6 on their colocated, dedicated or virtual servers please contact us and we’ll allocate you an address range and provide you with connectivity details.

Until the end of August 2010, all IPv6 bandwidth will be free.

A company blog has been something that we’ve talked about at Mythic Beasts for some time now, but we’ve never quite got round to it… until now.

One of the frustrating things about being an ISP is that all too often, the only time that your customers notice that you’re actually doing something is when it all goes wrong.  For example, our network is now completely unrecognisable from where it was three years ago, but for the most part the vast amount of work that has gone into this transformation has been completely invisible to our users.

The company has also changed significantly, having acquired the shared hosting business of Black Cat Networks, and more recently, the hosting, virtual server and co-location business of Blue Linux.  Integrating these services has allowed us to improve our own services, but in a lot of cases, this has happened in ways that are not directly visible to our users.

This blog is an attempt to give our customers (and anyone else who cares) some insight into what we’re up to, what’s in the future, and, when things do go wrong, provide a forum for discussing what happened and how we can improve in the future.