We’ve implemented DNSSEC support and IPv6 glue fully for .uk domains through our control panel. We’re still working on our wholesale for .com/.net/.org.
We’ve installed R on sphinx so sphinx users can do statistical computing using R. Here’s a trivial example of it in use,
[pete@sphinx R]$ R
R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08)
Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.
Natural language support but running in an English locale
R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.
> x <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6)
> y <- x^2
> print(y)
[1] 1 4 9 16 25 36
>
I was pointed at this performance comparison by Joyent regarding their SmartMachines compared to Amazon EC2 images and asked for a comment and how it compares to our machines.
| Server Size | Geekbench Score | Cost per month | Price per Geekbench point per month | EC2 compute units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 m1.small (1 core, 1.7GB) | 1615 | $70.68 | $0.043 | 1 |
| EC2 m1.large (2 cores, 7.8GB) | 1887 | $282.72 | $0.150 | 4 |
| EC2 c1.xlarge (8 cores, 7GB) | 2375 | $565.44 | $0.238 | 8 |
| Joyent 1GB Smart Machine | 8461 | $125 | $0.014 | ? |
| Mythic Beasts Servers | ||||
| Apple TV (1 core 1Ghz) | 886 | n/a | n/a | 1 |
| Mac Mini (Core Duo 1.66Ghz) | 1920 | £20.83 | £0.011 | 2 |
| Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz) | 2304 | £29.17 | £0.013 | 3 |
| Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz) | 3331 | £50 | £0.015 | 4 |
| Mac Mini (Core i5 2.3Ghz) | 5353(estimate from 2.5Ghz model) | £41.67 | £0.008 | 6.5 |
| Mac Mini (Core i5 2.5Ghz) | 5928 | n/a | n/a | 7 |
| Mac Mini (Quad Core i7 2.0Ghz) | 8743 | £80 | £0.009 | 11 |
| Old RAID 1 server (Dual AMD 2.5Ghz) | 2788 | £100 | £0.035 | 4 |
| New RAID 1 server (Quad Intel 1.83Ghz) | 6430 | £135 | £0.021 | 10 |
| VDS256 (KVM virtual machine) | 3005 | £12.50 | £0.0042 | 2 |
The first obvious thing is the cheapest way to buy geekbench points from us is with a KVM virtual machine which offers much better price performance than any hardware platform. This means either we’re very stupid and we’re selling our virtual machines at a loss, or just like Joyent, our virtual machines will use as much CPU as is available on the host at the time – performance isn’t guaranteed and will slow down when other customers use it. On a fully loaded server with every VM being 256MB and running benchmarks at the same time I’d expect that performance figure to divide by about a factor of six for the worst case.
The second thing to notice is the performance comparison with Amazon doesn’t show a substantial increase with number of CPUs unlike the tests on Mythic Beasts servers. That suggests to me that Joyent have managed to run the benchmark in single threaded mode when testing their competitors but multi-threaded mode on their own hardware. I find it exceedingly hard to believe that an 8 core amazon virtual machine has the same CPU performance as a 4 year old introductory level mac mini and is blown away by my desktop mac with only two cores.
We’re happy to report that after nearly four years we’ve finally finished the migration of the very last Black Cat Networks related services into our network so everything is now hosted and managed by Mythic Beasts with no remaining dependencies on third party providers. The migration has taken quite a lot longer than we first predicted, in particular auditing and cleaning up the various special cases that had been implemented for specific customers took a very long time.
During the migration we’ve achieved the following,
Our next ‘synergy’ is to merge the Mythic UML, Xen and Bluelinux Xen services into a single KVM based platform and to merge the remaining Bluelinux hosting services into our hosting platforms. We’ve already done their co-location, bandwidth and domain names.
Of course if anyone reading this happens to own a virtual server, colocation or shared hosting business with a customer base of technically competent users that they no longer want we’d be interested in talking to you.
We’ve now migrated ns2.mythic-beasts.com to it’s new home and our DNS is now available over IPv6 in time for customers to participate in World IPv6 day .
At Mythic Beasts we’re merging various services together into a single supported service. We’ve just completed migrating all our secondary DNS services into our control panel.
If you were previously using a secondary DNS service from either Mythic Beasts or Black Cat Networks your configuration has been migrated into our control panel. Autodns is now discontinued and the setup must be managed through our control panel or API.
Our control panel DNS applies more stringent checks than autodns. In particular secondary dns for a domain can only be managed by the owner of that domain, so a small number of customers who provided secondary for other customers have seen their configuration duplicated into the accounts of the domain holders.
As part of this work we will shortly be moving ns2.mythic-beasts.com to 93.93.128.67 / 2a00:1098:0:80:1000::10 in time for World IPv6 day. The new server is fully configured and is already attempting to slave zones, please make sure that you’ve configured your DNS master server to allow it to slave. The actual switch is planned for overnight on Monday 30th / Tuesday 31st May.
Shortly after this is complete the existing server which is also ns0.blackcatnetworks.co.uk will be switched off permanently. You should make sure you aren’t using the deprecated address ns0.blackcatnetworks.co.uk.
If you weren’t previously aware, customers of our dedicated server, virtual dedicated server or co-location services can use Mythic Beasts’ nameservers to provide secondary DNS for any domains hosted on your server. Similarly, we will provide free secondary DNS for any domains registered through us, with no restrictions on where the master server is. In either case, contact support to enable secondary DNS for your account.
If you have any questions, we’d be glad to answer them at support @ mythic-beasts.com.
On the left is a picture of the remarkably glamorous Steph, shortly after she finished running the London Marathon in aid of the Samaritans and in memory of her brother Chris Lightfoot, one of the founders of Mythic Beasts and a dearly missed close friend of ours.
We went to congratulate Steph in person, drop off our donation to the Samaritans and toast her finishing in under four hours. As someone who’s run the London Marathon before I can say that I wished I’d looked that good at the start, let alone the finish.
We’ve added a new API for managing our monitoring system. Now you can script shutting down the monitoring of your application while it’s offline for update and script the post deployment switch-on too.
As you may be aware there’s been a flurry of IPv6 related excitement in the past few days. IANA has allocated the last of the IPv4 address space to the regional registries. This means that obtaining IP addresses is going to become steadily more difficult from here and attempting to migrate the whole Internet to IPv6 is looking like more of an immediate priority.
We’ve been running an IPv6 network for over six months, yesterday we enabled IPv6 on two of our customer facing hosting servers, yali.mythic-beasts.com and onza.mythic-beasts.com. We also made their control panels and all services hosted on them available over IPv6.
pete@ubuntu:~$ dig AAAA yali.mythic-beasts.com +short 2a00:1098:0:86:1000::10
Temporarily an automated scripted cleaned up the A record for the hosts disabling access to all the services over IPv4 to all of our customers that don’t have IPv6 connectivity. As our support mailqueue testified, the majority of our customers do not have working IPv6 connectivity yet.
Unrelated to this activity we also discovered that by default linux limits the number of ipv6 routes to 4096. You can update this by doing,
echo 32768 >/proc/sys/net/ipv6/route/max_size
this is a good idea on any linux machine that sees the full routing table, the IPv6 routing table is now about 4300 routes.
If you are running Exim 4 you should be aware that a remote root vulnerability was discovered on Friday 10th December. This means that someone sending a specially crafted email to your server can completely take control of it.
If you are a managed server customer, you do not need to worry. All managed server customers were fully updated by the end of Saturday 11th December, including where necessary building non standard exim packages from source.
If you are not a managed customer then upgrading exim is your responsibility. We have notified all customers who look like they may be running a vulnerable version of exim.
Make sure /etc/apt/sources.list contains the line
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
then run
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
this will install a patched exim for you.
yum update
will installed a patched exim for you.
there is no security update provided by Debian. You will have to roll your own Debian package with the fix or upgrade your server or exim package to Debian Lenny.
You should make sure you have the appropriate security lines in your apt configuration and follow the instructions for Debian Lenny above.
You should be purchasing a managed service from us and we will manage it for you, contact us at support@mythic-beasts.com.
If you think that building a centos 5.5 backport of exim for a customer who’s compelled to run an early version of Fedora is both possible and fun, contact us at our jobs page and we’ll let you know when we’re hiring.