Recent Posts

Topic: Brightbox Help / SPF Records

Thanks John. I should have googled the karoo.kcom.com address before bothering you as it turns out it belongs to my development ISP, so I obviously managed to run some of my tests in development mode by accident, further confused by the email replies arriving late and out of order. Yes, I’m an idiot.

Chris.

Topic: Brightbox Help / SPF Records

Hi Chris,

mail sent through our relays should never go via any host on the kcom.com domain, or that IP (neither of which are associated with us at all), so I don’t know what is going on there. Our senders list is up to date. Make sure your app is configured to use some 3rd party relay of some kind.

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / SPF Records

Morning…

I have been trying to set up an SPF record on my domain for sending email through the Brightbox SMTP relay as explained in the Wiki:

v=spf1 a mx a:smtp-senders.brightbox.net -all

I sent messages to check-auth@verifier.port25.com and some pass and some fail. On the failed ones I am told that the message has been sent through smtpout.karoo.kcom.com (212.50.160.34). The recommendation is that I change my SPF record to:

v=spf1 a mx a:smtp-senders.brightbox.net a:smtpout.karoo.kcom.com -all

Is that the correct thing to do, or am I doing something else wrong? Does the senders list need updating?

Thank you!
Chris

Topic: isitruby19.com / gems not found

could you please add http://rubygems.org/gems/prowly ? it’s working in Ruby 1.9 in Mac OS Snow Leopard.

Topic: Passenger / Is there a timescale to support Rails 2.3 on Passenger?

ME,too!I’m interested in testing the new packages too, but I don’t see them in the apt repository. Are they available yet?

Topic: Brightbox Help / Domain Name Change Problem

Hi Nikki,

I can’t think how adding a new domain name would have caused this. Did you edit your Apache config manually, or did you use our Capistrano recipe?

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / Domain Name Change Problem

Hello,

I have an app deployed on a Brightbox and up until now had been using the default domain name to access it. Everything has worked great. Yesterday I tried to use the directions found here: http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:dns to create a new primary domain. The site works well when just using the new www.mydomainname.com url but now whenever I go to a subdirectory – www.mydomainname.com/cms I’m getting a 403 Forbiden error. I’m confused since it still works fine with the default domain, which I moved to be an alias.

Have I missed something or am I going to have to do some customization to the apache config? I thought I would ask here before I start pulling stuff apart too much on my own, as it might be something simple that I’m missing. I hope. :)

Thanks!
nikki

Topic: General Discussion / How to implement recurring billing?

PayPal is an easy-to-use tool for making payments and ActiveMerchant www.activemerchant.com is a great Ruby library for payment processing. A lot of us already have PayPal accounts for eBay and it works great in auctions, where you pay just once. However, ActiveMerchant currently does not support recurring billing through PayPal.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Comment spam

I think we’ve cracked the spam problem now. Defensio.com is blocking the majority of it now, with no false positives so far.

John.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Comment spam

Hi Roger, Dave,

thanks for the heads up on this and sorry for not responding sooner. We’ve been manually cleaning up the spam for a while now but it’s relentless. We were rather naive in thinking the captcha would prevent spam on it’s own (though it did ok for a while!).

Anyway, we’re now working on adding proper spam checking, using the defensio.com service. It’s actually been deployed already but we’re still seeing spam so it’s clearly still work in progress. I’d hope we’ll have it sorted next week and the code on github.

John.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Comment spam

Yeah, same thing for other common gems, like mysql and mongrel.

isitruby1.9 is (was) a very valuable resource. Thanks for that, Brightbox. But now, you’re dragging your name through the mud with the way the site is going, and turning people off from using Ruby 1.9. Either take your site down completely or release the source code to the community so they can help you fix the problem.

UPDATE: Apologies, I see the source code is in fact on Github. I hope there’s a solution that can be found for this spam problem!

UPDATE 2: OK, I just forked it. Before I do anything, let’s have a discussion around it. I’m thinking about adding verification questions:

e.g.

Supply the name of the method on Enumerable (i.e. Enumerable#?) that matches this description:
enum.? {| obj | block } => array
Returns a new array with the results of running block once for every element in enum.

With the answer, of course, being map or collect.

We only need a few of these questions to end the spam problem. Please let me know your thoughts.

Topic: Brightbox Help / max_user_connections error from script/console

Hi folks

We’re seeing the following error when doing any ActiveRecord queries in script/console production.

script/console production
Loading production environment (Rails 2.3.5) 
>> a = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('select * from Users limit 1')
Mysql::Error: User 'newmans' has exceeded the 'max_user_connections' resource (current value: 5)

In the database.yml, we have

host: db02.mysql.vm.brightbox.net
pool: 5

I’d expect the Rails web app will release any connections back to the pool after each request, rather than hoarding them? And, the MySQL driver should take care of any resource allocation/deallocation?

Any help appreciated

Tobin

Topic: isitruby19.com / Search not working at all

Thanks!

Topic: isitruby19.com / Search not working at all

Sorry about that – back up and running

Topic: Brightbox Help / Ubuntu Lucid and ImageMagick

Hi there,

do you maybe know of any problems with Ubuntu Lucid and ImageMagick? (And: is it preinstalled on new BBs? :-))

Best
dw

Topic: isitruby19.com / Search not working at all

Type: mongrel, rack or anything, and no gems are found, when in fact there are such gems on isitruby19, maybe something is wrong with Ferret’s search index, not reloaded? I love this website, so it’s making me sad when I see this, can anyone help?

Topic: isitruby19.com / Comment spam

I clicked on Nokogiri and found that the last 8 comments were spam. (Spread across the last 21 days.)

I didn’t see any way to mark them as such on the site, or any way to bring them to your attention other than by using this forum.

Thanks!

Roger_S

Topic: Brightbox Help / Mysql tunnel on Mac

Hi Rob,

I think the wiki page is slightly misleading, in that it tells you to connect to “localhost”. If you do connect to localhost, mysql interprets that as you want to connect to a socket, and looks for the default socket instead. In your case, /tmp/mysql.sock.

You actually want to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 3306 to make sure you use the tunnel.

Personally instead of stopping the local mysql service, I just make the local tunnel port 3305 and tell my client to connect to that instead.

The MySQL GUI I use on the mac is Sequel Pro, which happens to have ssh tunnelling built right into it. You just tell it which host to tunnel through and it deals with setting up the tunnel and connecting to mysql over it.

HTH,
Caius

Topic: Brightbox Help / Mysql tunnel on Mac

Hi,

In the past I’ve connected to the mysql cluster from a Windows machine without problems.

I’m now trying to get a tunnelled connection working on a Mac.

I’ve followed the notes on the WIKI re tunneling through to MYSQL (from a MAC) but can’t get a connection. I don’t have MySQL running locally (I stopped the service).

I have a SSH shell running with the tunnel commands as per the WIKI.

Error msg is:

“Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2) (code 2002)”

Can you suggest any pointers to diagnose the problem further?

Cheers

Rob

Topic: isitruby19.com / gems not found

Also missing (and not 1.9)

http://rubygems.org/gems/fast_trie

Topic: Brightbox Help / Deployment and apt-get password

Hi,

the password is needed to run sudo commands and sudo doesn’t support ssh keys.

You can tell Capistrano the password in the recipe though, and it’ll enter it for you whenever it’s needed:

set :password, “mysecrets”

we do recommend keeping this out of your code repository though – see the advanced gem settings page on the wiki for example of how to do this:

http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:gemv2:advanced…

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / Imagemagick hogging CPU

Hi Jim,

this might be due to a corrupt jpg that was uploaded, or maybe a bug in imagemagick.

alternatively, it might be simply that you’re running very low on ram and there isn’t quite enough for imagemagick to do its magick.

stopping it hogging so much cpu is tricky. You can use rlimits (see the ulimit command in the bash manpage) but that will just result in it being killed if if uses more then x seconds of cpu.

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / SMTP Relay

Hi Brett,

open a support ticket with us with some details of a missing message and we’ll track it down in our relay logs and see where the problem might be.

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / deploy and database content

Hi people,

So I’m still finding my way around rails development and Brightbox deployment/management and hoping there’s no such thing as a dumb question:
Is the database content on my development machine supposed to be uploaded with any of the deployment scripts?

Right now I’m developing on a mac (I’m pretty sure I installed all the latest versions of ruby and rail etc about a month or so ago). Everything so far seems to work fine. I have two different rails apps running on my Brightbox server, two different rails apps running on my dev machine. I can make changes on my dev machine and deploy them to the server without any issues. Going to the live site on the Brightbox the database is all in there and I can add and delete content fine. But say if I add records (so content) on my dev machine (for a simple example take a typical scaffold for movie, and I add Gone with the wind to the database) and I do either deploy or deploy:migrations this information does not appear on my server. I was wondering if there was a deploy method which would do this? Or what’s the easiest solution for it?
So far all I can think of is taking a dump of my database on my dev machine and manually upload it to the live site. The reason I want to do this is so I can create a website with all the bells and whistles and upload it all (content and all) to the live site. Is this possible?

Anyway if this isn’t can someone give me an example on how to take a dump of my dev database and upload it to my brightbox app?

Thanks!

Topic: Brightbox Help / Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.2 (you have 1.3.1). Please `gem update --system` and try again.

Hi, I was getting this, and found a restart of apache to do the trick

Topic: Passenger / Getting the current environment

On my previous server, Rails.env returned the environment name I’m running. This also works on my localhost (Windows).

However, on Brightbox regardless of the environment, it’s returning “test”. Even at this, the application is using the correct database for the environment that’s running so I don’t think it’s that I’m running the “test” environment accidentally.

Is this something to do with using Passenger instead of Mongrel (which I used before)?

Thanks,
Aaron

Topic: General Discussion / Hosting Advice

Hey all,

Hopefully this isn’t too off topic, I’m hoping to get some support and advice about using Brightbox as the backbone of a new web design/development studio I am setting up…

Having just been made redundant after a 5 year run at a PHP design and development company I have made the decision to setup as a freelance provider, and make the switch from PHP to “live the dream” by working with Rails.

Obviously one of the key points I need to work out is the hosting. The clients I will be aiming for will expect an “all in one” solution from me, if I am building them a site with Rails I will almost certainly need to organise the hosting, and I am all too aware that a shoddy shared host just isn’t going to cut it when it comes to Rails.

It seems that Brightbox is offering a good service in the UK, and seems to provide a quick setup which will save me messing around with slices and the like.

I’m hoping to use some of Brightbox’ features as part of my “sell” the MySQL cluster is presumably much more powerful than a DB running on the same box. It seems without taking the managed back-ups I am going to have to roll my own, transferring DB dumps and uploads to S3 seems a good way to go. I’m not sure how many clients are going to care about this, but in my rather short career I’ve not heard of many freelancers who take the integrity of the sites they deploy very seriously – please correct me if I am wrong, of course!

Unless using an internal server I am assuming the clients will also need me to provide email. I’ve been considering Google Apps Standard Edition to fill this gap – has anyone got any experience with this, any alternatives?

Is anyone here doing anything similar? Is this a route worth taking or do I need to rethink?

Any advice or comments would be much appreciated, thanks in advance,

Andy

Topic: Brightbox Help / Deployment and apt-get password

I am deploying my application with the Brightbox gem 2.3.6.

The server has a copy of my public SSL key, so “cap deploy” doesn’t constantly ask for the server password.

Unfortunately, the “apt-get update” command is still asking for the password during deployment, despite the public key:

• executing `packages:install’
  Checking required packages are installed
  Updating apt-get
• executing “sudo -p ’sudo password: ’ apt-get update -qy >/dev/null”

This gets quite annoying after a while, as it disrupts the otherwise fully automated deployment process.

Is there a way to make “sudo apt-get” use the ssl key instead, or to disable this command altogether?

Topic: Brightbox Help / Change App from Mongrel to Passenger

I’ve just found the answer at the bottom of this wiki page http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:gemv2:passenger

Topic: Brightbox Help / Change App from Mongrel to Passenger

I have an existing app running on my brightbox that is using mongrel and I would like it to run on Passenger. I tried adding require brightbox/passenger to deploy.rb but after a restart I still go monit notifications saying 2 mongrels instances exist. Thanks.