Fedora 20 ISOs now available

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Eddie

We’re delighted to announce we’ve updated our Fedora ISOs to the recently released Fedora 20. As usual, we have both the i386 and x86_64 architectures.

The Fedora 20 release coincides with Fedora’s tenth anniversary! For more information about Fedora 20 see the release announcement.

As always, if there is a particular operating system you’d like to see in our collection, whether you are a prospective customer thinking about joining us, or an existing customer, do not hesitate to suggest it, we will almost certainly say Yes!

Maintenance 21st December

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Eddie

We will be performing essential maintenance work on our VPS host servers between 2AM – 4AM GMT on Saturday 21st December. During this window your VPS will be unavailable for up to 20 mins while the host server is rebooted. Before rebooting we will be sending each VPS an ACPI Shutdown signal. If you have configured your VPS to respond to this, it will start it’s shutdown procedure, and shutdown cleanly. If you would like help configuring your VPS to respond to this, please raise a support ticket and we will be happy to help.

Additionally, we’d like to inform customers of additional work taking place between 1AM – 2AM GMT on Friday 20th December on our web servers and VPS control panel only. During this window all of our websites and VPS control panel will be unavailable for approx. 20 mins.

We’d like to apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by this essential work.

Update 21st Dec 03:40AM – This work has been completed successfully and all VPS are back up and running. If you are experiencing any problems at all at this time with your VPS please raise a support ticket. Many thanks to all customers for their patience during this essential work. There is no further maintenance planned during the festive period and we will endeavour to not make any changes to our infrastructure or reboot VPS servers at least until the beginning of January, save in emergency situations.

Free Two Week Trial

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Eddie

We are delighted to announce we have 20 free two week trials of our VPS10 package available immediately, on a first come, first come basis.

~~But there are only 20 available and when they’re gone, they’re gone!~~ Update 6th Dec 2013 13:51 GMT– The 20 have gone but we’ve added 10 more trials so those who might have missed out can still benefit from this offer. We’ll post again here as soon as these 10 are gone.

Update 7th Dec 2013 16:15 GMT – There are 3 trials left so the 10 we added yesterday will soon be gone. For anyone who comes across this post in future, we will add more free trial places from time to time, as and when capacity allows. To check if there are places available just click through via the link below and if there are free places the system will allow you to order a free trial. If you cannot order a free trial, just contact us and we’ll see if we can offer you a trial at that point.

The Small Print

A payment of either 5 pence (0.05 GBP) or 5 cents (0.05 USD) is required to order the free trial, but you will then be refunded in full on order acceptance, making this a completely free trial!

This is a full, unrestricted trial, you will get everything you would normally get if you had ordered a VPS10 package without a trial, we’ll even accept reverse DNS requests.

You must log into the control panel and start your VPS within 72 hours of order acceptance, otherwise we will cancel your free trial. If you are unable to do this and need more time, please raise a support ticket between 48 and 72 hours after order acceptance (and not any earlier than this) and we can give you more time. All trialists who log in and start their VPS at least once within 72 hours will be allowed to continue the trial.

Only 1 trial per household or company/organisation allowed. Offer only open to new customers.

On Day 8 of the trial period we will issue an invoice for the first month of service commencing at the end of your trial, for our VPS10 plan. If you do not wish to continue the trial at the end of 14 days, simply raise a support ticket to let us know before the end of the trial, and we will cancel the invoice, and your trial and VPS service will end after 14 days. However, if you are happy to continue with service after the trial, simply pay the invoice before the end of the trial and your VPS service will continue working normally without interruption after the trial, with no need to sign up or order again. You can also choose a different plan to continue with, instead of VPS10, just raise a support ticket letting us know which plan you’d like.

To order your trial VPS10 for 5 pence (0.05 GBP) click here (the 5 pence is refunded on order acceptance)

To order your trial VPS10 for 5 cents (0.05 USD) click here (the 5 cents is refunded on order acceptance)

Centos 6.5 and Linux Mint 16 ISOs now available

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Eddie

We are a VPS company that strives to always have the latest operating systems available as soon as possible after release, so that our customers can benefit from uptodate installs. On that note we’re very pleased to announce that we have added 32-bit and 64-bit installable ISOs for the just released Centos 6.5 and Linux Mint operating systems. For Centos 6.5, as well as the standard DVD install ISOs, we’ve also added both the minimal and net install ISOs.

You can find the release announcement for Centos 6.5 here, and the release announcement for Linux Mint 16 here.

Planned maintenance Sunday 1st Dec 2AM – 4AM GMT

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Eddie

On Sunday December 1st, between 2AM – 4AM GMT, we will be performing essential OS updates on all of our VPS servers. During this window your VPS will be unavailable for up to 20 mins while the host server is rebooted. Before rebooting we will be sending each VPS an ACPI Shutdown signal. If you have configured your VPS to respond to this, it will start it’s shutdown procedure, and shutdown cleanly. If you would like help configuring your VPS to respond to this, please raise a support ticket and we will be happy to help.

We’d like to apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by this essential work.

Update 3:22AM Sunday December 1st – Unfortunately we have had to back out of the the updates we had planned due to an unforeseen issue that arose while performing the update on the first server.

Update 3:07AM Monday December 2nd – We have postponed the planned updates again (see below). Our sincere apologies for changing our plans yet again, but we are not ready yet, and we want to make sure the updates proceed as smoothly as possible, rather than risk service instability. Additionally, we have updated this post with an increased downtime period of 20 mins, instead of the previously advised 10 mins.

We are rescheduling the updates to take place tomorrow, on Tuesday December 3rd between 2AM – 4AM GMT. Please note downtime to each VPS will be up to 20 mins.

Update 4:33AM Tuesday December 3rd – The above work has been completed successfully. All VPS have started. If you are experiencing any issues please raise a support ticket.

Virtual Hardware Random Number Generator

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Eddie

A common problem with virtualised operating systems is lack of entropy. The Wikipedia entropy page defines it very well as “the randomness collected by an operating system or application for use in cryptography or other uses that require random data”. Virtual machines often lack entropy due to the lack of real hardware sources in a virtualised environment for the OS to use to create entropy.

Add to this the fact that headless physical servers which virtual machines run on often also don’t have much entropy themselves, because of the lack of keyboard and mouse input, and you have a problem. The problem is that low entropy causes encryption operations on your VPS to become less secure and much slower.

However, if you have a VPS with us at Manchester VPS, unlike with many other VPS providers, your VPS does not have to suffer from these problems.

Firstly, on all our physical servers we use the HAVEGE algorithm to pool entropy, by running the haveged entropy daemon. As a result, our physical servers have plenty of entropy available.

Secondly, as we use KVM as our virtualisation platform, we can make available this entropy pool to your VPS as a virtualised Hardware Random Number Generator device, using VirtIORNG.

What this boils down to is, for your Linux VPS, you only have to take the following two steps:

Log into our VPS Control Panel, and go into the “General Settings” page. On this page you will see an option to enable VirtIORNG for your VPS, if it is not enabled already.
In your Linux VPS run the rngd daemon like this: rngd -r /dev/hwrng

That’s it, with these 2 steps you should find that your VPS can now enjoy a good entropy pool. Cryptographic tasks will now complete much faster and encryption software running on your VPS will be much more secure.

To verify whether your VPS has the virtual rng present, run the following command in a terminal in your Linux VPS:

cat /sys/devices/virtual/misc/hw_random/rng_available

which should show “virtio” as being available

and

cat /sys/devices/virtual/misc/hw_random/rng_current

should also show “virtio” as the currently selected hardware rng.

Additionally, you can check that the file /dev/hwrng exists, which is the hardware rng device file.

So how will your VPS benefit from the increased entropy pool? If you run anything that uses encryption, it will benefit. If you run an SSL website, a VPN such as OpenVPN, or have a lot of SSH sessions connecting, these are all examples of software that will benefit.

If you have any difficulty getting this to work for your VPS, don’t hesitate to raise a support ticket and we will be happy to help.

Centos 6.5 coming soon

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Eddie

With RedHat about to release Enterprise Linux 6.5, the Centos team have started building Centos 6.5 today (see this forum post). Judging by recent Centos releases, we’ll be likely to see them releasing 6.5 in a few days or so. As soon as they do we’ll be grabbing the ISOs and adding them to our libraries so that customers can upgrade or install using an ISO.

By the way, if you have a RedHat Enterprise Linux subscription, you can install it onto a VPS if you provide us with the ISOs. Please raise a ticket if you would like to do so.

openSUSE 13.1 ISOs added

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Eddie

The long awaited and much anticipated release of openSUSE 13.1 took place on Tuesday, so we have added the amd64 and i586 installable ISOs, plus Net install and Rescue ISOs, to our collection so that new installs can take advantage of the latest release.

For more information about this release, have a look at the release announcement here, which has many details about what is in this important release.

Debian 6.0.8 net install ISO added

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Eddie

We have just added the net install ISO image to our collection, for the oldstable Debian 6.0.8 “squeeze” security update that was released yesterday. This allows anyone who still wishes to do a fresh install of Squeeze on their VPS to do so with the latest 6 release.

As you may know we are not keeping the full set of Debian 6 ISOs anymore, which are a set of 8 ISOs of around 30GB of size. This is because Debian highly recommends that people install the current Debian 7 stable “Wheezy” release instead, and we do keep the full set of ISOs for that release. Debian will only continue to provide security updates for 6 until around May 2014. However, if you do have a specific need to install Debian 6, the netinstall image will allow you to install the base OS, and you can then install whatever packages you need from inside the OS using apt-get.

You can read the release announcement for 6.0.8 here.

Centos 5.10 ISOs added

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Eddie

As Centos 5.10 was released today, we have refreshed our Centos 5 install ISOs to the new version, so that new installs of Centos 5 can take advantage of the latest version.

If you are already running CentOS-5.9 or an older CentOS-5 release, all you need to do is update your machine via yum by running :

‘yum update’

Running ‘yum list updates’ before doing the update is recommended, so you can get a list of packages that are going to be updated. To check you are indeed on CentOS-5.10, run : ‘rpm -q centos-release’ and that should return: ‘centos-release-5-10.el5.centos.1’

The Release Notes for CentOS-5.10 can be found on-line at :

http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.10