6sync

Everyone here at 6sync wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  We hope you will spend it in joy, and will be surrounded by the warmness of people’s hearts.

We hope you like our small present – if you didn’t receive it yet, you will eventually, unless the dog ate it or something

- Mario & Rav

After a long time coming, IPv6 reverse DNS records can now be instantly created and deleted within Biscuit. Woohoo!

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is now available for new and existing deployments. There are lots of package updates with this new release, including the Linux 3.0 kernel! Have fun.

In the past couple of weeks many of you approached us and asked what is going on since it has been unusually quiet at 6sync. Well, in a way, we are all happy that things are quiet, it means that there are no real problems and can focus on other things. On the other hand, it could be a sign of trouble – but not in this case, of course

We are hard at work behind the counter of our bakery cooking something really great for all you guys. By constantly challenging ourselves and trying to improve our service, we hope to provide you with  even better performance and resilience, while delivering breakthroughs in value and flexibility.

A lot of nice things are happening, and everything is moving along nicely. We will keep you posted – in the mean time, enjoy your stay at 6sync and don’t forget to tell your friends about us.

Folks, get your bleeding-edge fix right here. Due to popular demand, read: the nagging of a select few, Fedora 15 is now available as an additional Biscuit flavor! All future Fedora releases will also be supported.

As we all should know, our traditional [IPv4] addresses are being rapidly depleted. But, not to fear, IPv6 was designed to succeed the old system and provide with at almost limitless supply of new addresses as well as new changes to the way the Internet communications stack works. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will be gradual but 6sync have now taken our first steps toward this by rolling out IPv6 connectivity!

Each 6sync client will now receive access to an entire IPv6 /64 block which will provide 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) addresses that can be used! And yes, that is more addresses than what is available in the entire IPv4 space You can assign these addresses amongst your biscuits any way you wish.

How do I get it?! Addresses have already been assigned to most clients and you can find it under the IP Addressing section of Biscuit. If you don’t see your allocation there yet don’t worry,.. a few people will have to wait a weeee bit longer and we will email those affected (Sorry guys!)

EDIT: check out the new IPv6 setup guide!

How do I use it?! Currently we are not using the auto-configuration feature of IPv6 so you must manually choose and configure all your addresses. We have some more detailed guides about how to do this on the way, for now something like:

sudo ip -6 addr add 2605:4500:xxxx:xxxx::yyyy/64 dev eth0

will work! (Remember to replace xxxx with your assigned IP block and yyyy with a natural number like ’6′ or ’123′)

Is it working?! Best way to check is to ping someone..

ping6 ipv6.google.com

if you get a response back then all is well, congratulations.

The release of CentOS 6 was something we eagerly anticipated, not only because of its many new features and fixes, and fresh new packages, but also because it brings even more benefits to each and every one of us that love virtualization.

Here at 6sync we have been busy the last few weeks with testing, testing and some more testing of the new CentOS 6 release, and now that its finally announced by the CentOS team, we can’t be more happy and proud to offer you CentOS 6 image. CentOS 6 replaces CentOS 5 as the preferred deployment option if CentOS is your thing, but we will be supporting CentOS 5 in Biscuit for quite some time as well.

Some of the new features include ext4 (think, blazing fast performance), newer kernel, updated PHP and various other pieces of software that will make your life better, faster and more reliable.

We hope you will be enjoying this brand new CentOS release, and as always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us should you have any questions.

Unfortunately, the time has come where all of us had to go through the storm – after one year of flawless network operation, something cracked and we experienced downtime. This post serves as an explanation, and an apology on our part – rest assured we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening in the future.

Somewhere around 14:00 CET we received several notifications of servers and VMs going offline, and immediately assigned on the job technicians who started to troubleshoot the issue. Network access was fully restored 90 minutes later, after identifying and fixing the issue.

The downtime happened due to issues with a cable crossing patch panel in Equinix DC between our cage and meet-me-room. The problem was an unusual one, so it couldn’t be immediately identified. When the issue was discovered network access was restored immediately. The cable crossing will be reorganized to eliminate the single point of failure.

We believe it is important to mention that all VMs remained online during network outage.

We apologize for for any issues this might have caused to you, and we will be issuing SLA credits for this downtime during the week. Thank you for staying with us, we love having you here.

So many things have happened since I have last talked with you through this medium we get to call “a blog”. And as we approach the middle of the month, I think its time to look at what we have accomplished so far, and all the happenings around us that we simply can’t ignore – yes, I am talking about Slicehost. Our 6baskets promotion is growing stronger each day, and many of you have chosen to give us your trust – we thank you for that, and are tirelessly working to impress you day after day. Probably one of the most important kickers to our promotion campaign has been Rackspace announcement on Slicehost closing the doors. Don’t get me wrong, we planned this promotion months ahead, but it turned out really great because a lot of Slicehost customers.

Of course, we invite everybody else, including other Slicehosters to join us and we will provide them with a comfortable home, with cozy pillows and all that fluff included. We will probably also cut your bills, and increase your performance. Not to mention that in most cases we will be able to automatically migrate you to your new residence. But this is not about us, this is about you – we want you to be happy, so come and talk to us. Even if we are not the right solution for you, we will help you find you something that will satisfy your needs.

Onto other things, together with you, our beloved clients, we have been planning on how to proceed with documentation, and I am glad to announce that we will soon start working on writing stuff that will be both useful and fun. We want you to help – if you know how to write english, know sysadmin and you are willing to work with us, poke me at mario@6sync.com. We will be giving away nice prizes in form of free month(s) for people who collaborate with us.

Oh, and for the first time in the 6sync history you guys spread the word about 6sync so far and wide that we are having some troubles satisfying the demand – so better hurry up if you want to get your server right now!

See ya around, its great knowing you all.