Nominet is the domain name registry that ultimately controls .co.uk, .org.uk, and most other second-level domains under .uk. Till now, they have only allowed domain names to be registered for 2 years – no more, no less.

That changed today, 1st May 2012, and so we pleased to be able to offer Nominet domain registrations for up to 10 years. As well as receiving a discount for the longer registration period, you can rest assured that your domain is yours with no need to renew till 2022!

Or, going in the other direction, if you have a short-term project that deserves a .uk domain name, you could register for just 1 year.

We’ve also today added a bunch of new Top Level Domains that we can support, including .tel, .au, .nz, and extending our coverage of European countries: here are the full details of supported domains and prices. (Even more Top Level Domains may be available on request – email us if you don’t see what you’re after!)

Matt Smith has very handily also written a guide for installing Debian on our VDS service, which is particularly helpful for end users running Windows on their local machine.

One of our braver customers who wishes to remain anonymous has been trying out NetBSD on our KVM based virtual server platform. This is unsupported but he’s written us the following advice that any future customers might appreciate.

Firstly, the default network device is not going to work under 
NetBSD, so running

    netdev rtl8139

before installing is needed. Because of the default realtek 
driver in NetBSD, the install will be a bit choppy - 
recommended pulling packages from CD instead of network.

After that recompiling the kernel is needed, with 2 
modifications.

I've based my config on GENERIC, so simply copying the 
GENERIC config file and commenting out the re* driver. 
This will make the kernel use the older rtk driver, which 
will work. Mind that /etc/ifconfig.re0 will need to be 
copied to /etc/ifconfig.rtk0 to make sure it comes up with
network enabled after boot. Just find the line starting with 
re* and comment it out.

Before recompiling, edit /usr/src/sys/netinet/if_arp.c and 
lookup the line matching "arp info overwritten". Simply 
delete the line (3 lines in total ending ";") as having this 
 being logged is a nuisance as your router IP keeps changing 
between interfaces (so arp table is constantly updating).

NetBSD isn’t an officially supported distribution as we have minimal direct experience with it, but if you’re happy to support yourself we hope this helps you get set up.

We’ve offered privacy on domain name registrations for some time, I’ve just deployed an update which makes it possible to enable or disable it for every supported domain through our control panel.

Earlier this year we installed some new hardware for our Virtual Dedicated Server cluster.  This has allowed us to not just double, but quadruple the amount of memory available on each of our VDS options.  Our base level VDS now comes with 1GB of RAM and is priced at £15/month including VAT.  In fact, if you pay for a year up front you can get it for the equivalent of just £12.50/month.

Naturally we’ll be offering these upgrades free of charge to our existing customers, but in order to do this we do need to move some servers onto different hardware.  We’ll be in touch shortly with a migration plan, although if you’re particularly keen to get an upgrade please drop support an email.

Five years ago we lost a good friend and founder of Mythic Beasts, Chris Lightfoot. In addition to his many public achievements we remember some of the smaller and less well documented experiments. The fan assisted barbeque that had a cooking range of several metres. The hot air balloon that was equally effective at setting fire to fences. The never yet satisfactorily explained quantum effects in the Theory of Asymptotic Washing Up.

Spurring on that traditional english eccentricity and hopefully providing a little inspiration to the next generation of super villans we’ve just agreed to donate a little server to providing hosting for Cambridge University Spaceflight. We’d like to think that in a universe where Chris’ waveform had collapsed differently he’d watch a rocket launch and associated datastream with a hidden sense of excitement before correctly pointing out ‘Now you have Two problems’.

At about 6pm this evening I’d just finished loading up a car to take some more servers to the data centre and rescue a customer who’d broken their server. As I did so a person with a black hood pulled over their head opened the back door of my car, grabbed my laptop bag and made a run for it.

Unfortunately for the opportunist, I’m a passable distance runner and I happened to be wearing the new running shoes which I’m breaking in. So I chased him hoping my stamina would lead him to tire and eventually I’d catch him.

Despite his apparent age advantage and his head start, after 225m (I measured it afterwards) it was obvious I was going to catch him so he dropped my laptop and continued to run away. I took the bait and retrieved my laptop rather than catching him and beating him to a pulp which in many ways would have been more satisfying.

Reflecting on the experience I have to say that was a lousy performance on the thief’s part, it should have taken me at least a mile to catch him. Why would you go into the smash and grab robbery business without learning how to run quickly first? As a result I’ve made a small donation to the Cambridge Parkrun because it’s nice that someone is attempting to do something to improve youth fitness because it seems they bloody well need it.

Over the weekend of January the 7th and January the 8th we upgraded our core routers in Sovereign House and Harbour Exchange. Previously Sovereign House had a 2x1GE bonded uplink into each router, with each router having 1G of transit and 1G of peering (different peering exchange and transit provider on each router). Now we have a 10GE ring around the two routers and the core switches and lots of spare 1G and 10GE ports on the routers so we can bring additional transit and peers online easily in the future.

The router upgrade was completed almost without issue, there was a brief period in the early hours of Sunday morning with incorrect configuration for one /24 in Sovereign House and our IPv6 gateway in Sovereign House was offline for an extended period because we hadn’t configured it to advertise correctly. Aside from those issues we were able to replace each router in succession relying on the redundancy provided by the other router to seamlessly fail over between them as they were replaced.

We’re happy to report that Cambridge customers didn’t observe a 12 hour outage with our Cambridge to Sovereign House connection on Friday 6th, everything correct rerouted via Harbour Exchange resulting only in a momentary blip when the connection failed catastrophically mid afternoon. Normal redundancy was restored in the early hours of Saturday morning after a large section of fibre had been replaced.

We’ve added a feature to our control panel so you can now configure the serial console server attached to your server, password, baud rate, terminal emulator and it even tells the username and hostname of the serial server to make it easier to find it.

http://status.mythic-beasts.com/

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