Slicehost

Until now, if you needed a different kernel for your Slice, you had to enter a ticket. Although the process was quick and relatively painless, we wanted to make things even easier.

We are happy to say that you can now select which kernel you would like for your Slice right from within the Slicemanager. This means there will be no delay in changing the kernel and you can swap them around as you see fit!

We tweaked the Slicemanager display to make things a little easier. Let's see what the Slice information page looks like:

Kernel Selection:

To change the kernel, click the 'kernel' link and then select your preferred version. As noted in the Slicemanager, this will immediately reboot your Slice into the new kernel:

That's it, done.

As always, do come into our chatroom if you have any questions. See you there!

PickledOnion

Our STL-A datacenter provider has a network maintenance window this evening. The window starts Friday, September 18 at 0500 GMT and runs through 1000 GMT. We do not expect any impact and our NOC and support team will be monitoring for problems. Should you encounter any issues, please email support or swing by the chatroom. Thanks!

We like creating stuff. We especially like people who create stuff off their own back.

Today we were honoured to present the Rackspace Cloud 'Einstein Award for Innovation' to a member of Slicehost Support for the work he put into creating and maintaining our public chatroom (http://chat.slicehost.com).

As we grew, the chatroom we were using wasn't really working and we needed a new solution. Josh Kearney, who runs our third support shift, volunteered to look into how we can better communicate. He may not have realised the size of the job when he volunteered but he tackled this project head on and much of the development was done in his spare time.

We can't give Josh enough praise for his effort and determination to see the project through the end and he still continues to improve it.

We also like facts and figures so I reckon we can share this with you:

It took Josh something like 80+ hours dedicated to designing and creating the room.

It allows customers to chat with us, live, from any web browser at any time of the day or night.

it allows us to ban those silly people who seem to want to cause havoc and link to nasty websites.

Customers can paste text and images into the room which can assist when explaining an issue.

We hope you like the chatroom. It's been live for a while now and the feedback has been very positive.

Here's to Josh and innovation!

PickledOnion

Quite a long 3-way Handshake podcast (episode 16) with Jason, Matt, Paul and Sabrina. We have a lot to chat about, not the least of which is big news regarding Matt:

Matt is moving on from Slicehost to pursue other interests. As he says in the podcast, it has been an amazing three years and he wants to try his hand at other opportunities. Although we are sad that Matt has his eye on pastures new, we understand and wish him the best of luck! Matt can still be reach via twitter (@zenmatt) and you can follow his blog (howradical.com)

On a similar note, we talk about Paul (a.k.a. PickledOnion) moving from the UK to San Antonio. This is a big step for Paul and for Slicehost as it allows a lot more interaction with Jason and rest of the crew who work in San Antonio. It also means he can fly to St Louis on a regular basis to visit our Slicehost brethren in our original office.

We answer a bunch of tweets and questions and also tackle the perennial questions of European datacenters and what exactly the differences are between Cloud Servers and Slicehost.

Intro music is Ice Cream Paint Job and outro is Fresh Blood.

We hope you enjoy it and thanks for your continued support.

Direct download

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iTunes link

Our STL-A datacenter provider has a network maintenance window this evening. The window starts on Friday at 0500 GMT and runs through 1000GMT. We do not expect any impact and our NOC and support team will be monitoring for problems. Should you encounter any issues, please email support or swing by the chatroom. Thanks!

We have the Slicehost Ops team in from San Antonio (Major, Ant and John) on this short podcast. Topics include bandwidth tweaks, the maintenance events in May and their day-to-day work. Intro Cha Cha Cha from the Go soundtrack, outro is Dirty Robot (Tofu remix). Enjoy!

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

We’ve found that one of our primary switches in the DFW1 datacenter needs to be replaced as soon as possible. The emergency maintenance is planned for this evening at 2AM GMT (9PM CDT) and it should be very brief.

Since our environment has redundant switching, the downtime should only be a matter of seconds. In the worst case scenario, the downtime should be less than 60 seconds. As soon as the switch is successfully replaced, we will provide an update regarding the network’s status.

We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance and for any inconvenience that it may cause. Thank you for your support!

UPDATE AT 2:45AM GMT: The maintenance is now complete and the switching has been thoroughly tested after the replacement. If you’re experiencing any on-going issues, please contact us at any time.

Just a reminder, tomorrow I’m headed to Velocity and then SF Cloudcamp in the evening. Several Rackspace folks will be at Structure, later in the week. On Thursday night we’re having a Slicehost/Rackspace meetup at the 21st Amendment starting at 6pm. Hope to see you around! Send me an email if you’d like to meet (matt@slicehost.com).

Everyone loves an update and today we’ve got a few for you:

Cloning – we mentioned this on our last podcast and it’s now live. You can create a new slice from the image of a running slice – cloning. Previously backups were required as the source of a cloned slice (that method remains available as well).

Bandwidth Cap Increase – Slices now have a bandwidth cap tied to their size, previously all slices had a 10mbps cap. 256slices start at 10mbps for the public interface and 20mbps for the private interface. The public interface increases by 10mbps with each size and the private interface is now 2x the public. For example: a 1024slice now has a 30mbps public interface cap and a 60mbps private interface cap, a 15.5GBslice has a 70mbps pulbic and a 140mbps private cap.

Lower RHEL pricing – now $22/month per slice, down from $36/month.

Thanks to our dev and ops team for their work bringing these features to production. If you have any questions please let us know. Enjoy!

I’m headed East for the Washington DC Cloud Camp this Wednesday. Next week it’s off to San Francisco for the anniversary of the first Cloud Camp. I love meeting Slicehosters at these events. Tickets are free and the camps deliver a good crowd and great conversations. Hope to see you there! If you can’t make it, ping me (matt@slicehost.com or @zenmatt) and we can grab food/coffee/drinks.

Couldn’t resist reposting this story from our forum:

The Slicehost iPhone App came handy when on vacation in May… A customer called stating they couldn’t get into my server, I was able to go into the app, confirm the status of it and make sure it was up. After they still couldn’t, I got onto the app store and bought iSSH and SSH’ed into it from the beach (Daytona). I don’t have a SIM card in it, but was able to piggyback off of one of the many hotel’s WiFi connections.

There will be an emergency maintenance window for STL-A on 06-02 from 0400-0600 GMT. This is a follow-up to the XO networking problems experienced earlier in the week by some customers. During this window, STL-A customers may notice brief connectivity issues as routes are updated. Should you experience any problems, please come by the chatroom or contact support. Thank you for your patience as we address these issues.

DATE: 06-02-2009

TIME: 0400-0600 GMT

IMPACT: Short delays in connectivity as routes change.

There will be an emergency maintenance window for STL-A on 06-01 from 0400-0600 GMT. This is a follow-up to the XO networking problems experienced earlier in the week by some customers. During this window, STL-A customers may notice brief connectivity issues as routes are updated. Should you experience any problems, please come by the chatroom or contact support. Thank you for your patience as we address these issues.

DATE: 06-01-2009

TIME: 0400-0600 GMT

IMPACT: Short delays in connectivity as routes change.

UPDATE: Canceled, to be rescheduled.

We’re decommissioning 2 fiber connections and activating 2 new connections tomorrow in STL-B. We will be onsite. working in tandem with our NOC and datacenter technicians to manage the event. No impact is expected. Should you experience any networking problems that you feel are related to this maintenance, please get in touch with our support team. Thanks!

DATE: 05-29-2009

TIME: 2000-2100 GMT

IMPACT: No impact expected.

As promised in our nameserver maintenance post, we have another maintenance event taking place on Saturday 06-06-2009 from 0400-0500 GMT. During this window, we’ll be rearranging the internal servers that power SliceManager.

DATE: Saturday June 6th

TIME: 0400-500 GMT

EVENT: Internal infrastructure changes

IMPACT: SliceManager, Slicehost API, new customer signups, slice resizes/rebuilds – all will be unavailable during the window. Your slices will remain up and running.

We’ll send out reminder tweets and update Slicehost Status during the maintenance window. If you have any questions, please get in touch with our support team. Thanks!