Recent Posts

Topic: Brightbox Help / SMTP Relay

Hi – tried following http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:smtprelay for setting up ActionMailer. As far as I can tell, emails are being sent, but never received. Can anyone suggest a good place to start debugging? What log files should I be looking at and where might they be?

brett

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

Getting some hands on support from Brightbox on this one. Apparently we had RubyGems install from source on the box as well as the packaged version.

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

I’m trying to deploy a new Rails app which uses Rails 2.3.4 onto Phusion Passenger.

I’m getting this error: Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.2 (you have 1.3.1). Please `gem update —system` and try again. but when I’m logged in as the rails user and run gem -v I see 1.3.6 (I’ve ran gem udpate —system)

Is this a path problem / is Phusion using looking elsehwere for gem to my local path?

Any advice – very appreciated.

Cheers

Rob

Topic: Brightbox Help / ssh script attacks

I’m noticing a fairly consistent level of sshd traffic caused by (I presume) attack scripts that are just working their way through a dictionary of usernames. For example:

Mar 1 15:54:37 … sshd ³¹⁶⁹⁹: Invalid user gambit from 125.152.96.154
Mar 1 15:54:40 … sshd ³¹⁷⁰³: Invalid user gambit from 125.152.96.154
Mar 1 15:54:42 … sshd ³¹⁷⁰⁷: Invalid user andrei from 125.152.96.154
Mar 1 15:54:44 … sshd ³¹⁷¹¹: Invalid user andrei from 125.152.96.154
Mar 1 15:54:47 … sshd ³¹⁷¹⁵: Invalid user andrei from 125.152.96.154

and so on. I’ve seen people write about using iptables rules to block these kinds of attacks, either as a result of too many password attempts (e.g. http://www.fail2ban.org/) or by rate limiting connection attempts (e.g. see bottom of http://www.aerospacesoftware.com/ssh-kiddies.html). Does anyone have a known-working solution on their Brightbox? I’m mostly concerned with removing the noise from my log files, reducing the load on the server and limiting the chances of one of these attacks being successful. I’m a bit wary of setting something up that might lock me out of the Brightbox completely!

Cheers,

-Mark.

Topic: Brightbox Help / deployment problems

Hi,

this is a bug in Capistrano’s windows support. Have you tried using the very latest capistrano, 2.5.17? See if that fixes your local deployment problem.

If this still isn’t fixed, as rob5 said, a workaround is to use git or svn deployment – not the “local” deploy (which uses the xcopy command and gets it wrong). Put your code in an svn or git repository and deploy from that to your server.

John.

Topic: Brightbox Help / deploy via github

Hi Volker,

github have a guide on deploying from github using Capistrano:

http://github.com/guides/deploying-with-capistrano

that might help you confirm a few options.

We use an ssh-agent to avoid having to put private keys on our servers. You load your key (or the github deploy key) into your local ssh agent, and then when git connects to github over ssh, it tunnels the authentication back to your desktop machine (see the Capistrano option mentioned in that article, ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true)

Hope that helps!

John.

Topic: isitruby19.com / gems not found

The ancestry gem isn’t in there either. Can you add it?

Topic: Brightbox Help / mysqldump and cron advice needed

Hi again

Just to say that I think this was to do with the pipe. I moved the command into an external .sh file then called that file from cron and it worked perfectly.

Extra note: I store the .sh file in a subversion repository. I needed the following command to mark it as executable:

svn propset svn:executable '' file.sh

Cheers!

Mike

Topic: Brightbox Help / mysqldump and cron advice needed

Hi all

Hoping someone can offer some advice … once a week, I take a mysqldump backup of my database. I always run this command from a terminal screen:

mysqldump -h sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net -p"PASSWORD" -u"USERNAME" USERNAME_APPNAME_production | gzip > /home/rails/backup_$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

It works perfectly. To save me logging in once a week, I want to set it up as a cron job which runs every Sunday and on the 1st of each month. I’ve used crontab -e to add the following line to my crontab file:

0 7 1 * 0 mysqldump -h sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net -p"PASSWORD" -u"USERNAME" USERNAME_APPNAME_production | gzip > /home/rails/backup_$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

Nothing seems to happen (there’s no backup file created). I first thought I’d scheduled it to only run on Sunday’s that are the first of the month but I’ve also tried 0 7 * * * to no avail. I have a suspicion it might be something to do with the pipe but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

Topic: isitruby19.com / JRuby gems?

It currently seems to be inactive or down. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/isitjruby.com

Topic: Brightbox Help / deploy via github

hey guys, do you have a wiki hidden somewhere about how to move from subversion to deploy via github. I think i got it mostly figured out but would like to be sure as it’s a live site…

cheers
Volker

Topic: Brightbox Help / Mongrel Cluster don't responde

Hi,

First, Thanks for the wonderful hosting service, I’m trying to use it to evaluate it to move our website and database to brightbox.

Now, I’m trying to setup mongrel cluster on my hosting, but I can’t make it work, in the console I can see that it says starting ports…, but I get no response from these ports, it’s not the case when I use single mongrel, single mongrel works fine.

Could you please help ASAP.

Thanks!

Topic: Brightbox Help / Mongrel returning empty responses

I’ve recently started having a very strange problem on my brightbox. I’m running the standard setup of Apache + Mongrel and it was working well.

In the last few days I keep getting problems where suddenly every request to the web site gets an empty response. I note that both Apache and both Mongrels continue to run throughout, memory usage is normal but they stop serving.

Sadly, because it’s not dying completely the standard monit setup doesn’t kick it back into life. Anyway, I’d rather discover the root cause of the issue rather than cludging it with a restart script.

Issuing a ‘sudo monit restart all -g blah’ makes everything work again, before it dies a few (random) hours later.

Any ideas?

Topic: isitruby19.com / rdoc_osx_dictionary (1.1.1) ?

This is not on your list and appears not to be working. I get the following errors installing with ruby 1.9.1 (p376):

updating OSX ruby + gem dictionary, if necessary
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — rdoc_osx_dictionary (LoadError)
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rdoc_osx_dictionary-1.1.0/bin/rdoc_osx_dictionary:7
updating OSX ruby + gem dictionary, if necessary
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — rdoc_osx_dictionary (LoadError)
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rdoc_osx_dictionary-1.1.0/bin/rdoc_osx_dictionary:7

Topic: isitruby19.com / thinking-sphinx (1.3.14)

Is not in your list, and appears not to be working.

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Thanks Caius. Nice to know. I had switched to a previous version of bunny in the meantime.

Topic: Brightbox Help / deployment problems

Hi Ant

Are you able to get through this? if yes, Could you please tell me the process clearly?

Thanks in advance

Regards,
Venu

Topic: Brightbox Help / deployment problems

Hi Rob5,

Could you please explain this clearly? I have same problem when deploying the code from windows client to Brightbox server.
This is the error message I am getting http://pastie.org/769869

Thanks in advance

Regards,
Venu

Topic: isitruby19.com / Automatically check compatibility of gems

Maybe you could ask runcoderun to do the testing.

Topic: Brightbox Help / SVN User Permissions

Hi,

I have a repository set up on my BrightBox. I am working with another developer who by my customer’s request must only have access to a certain part of the repository. I am using public/private key over SSH to access the repository.

From my understanding, the steps necessary to fulfil my customer’s request are to:

• configure svn to allow access to the particular path for my co-developer
• limit which users can log into the brightbox as root – a brightbox configuration. This is so users cannot log in and change the svn configuration to allow access to the whole repository

So, has anyone done this and can give me a few pointers – particularly the SVN configuration as I think the Brightbox stuff is in the knowledge base? I’m under pressure to do this before Xmas!

Many thanks,
Barry

Topic: Brightbox Help / multiple sites on one brightbox

Hi John, we had a application before, let that is first.myusername-001.vm.brightbox.net. That was deployed by another developer. Now i have deployed another application using capistrano, let that is second. but when i try to access second.myusername-001.vm.brightbox.net, it shows the first one, whats the reason? and how i can delete the first application which is deployed by another developer, i don’t know what he used to deploy.

Thanks
Musa

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Warren 0.9.2 has been pushed to github and published to rubyforge/gemcutter. It now depends on bunny 0.6.0 and handles the changes made in bunny 0.6.0. See the documentation for BunnyAdapter#subscribe if you need the extra headers returned by bunny with each message.

Topic: Brightbox Help / max_user_connections

Hello,

today is see this error in my log files:
User ‘snetwork’ has exceeded the ‘max_user_connections’ resource (current value: 5)

And my User see a 500er Error Page on my website.

How i can handle this problem? The error is only coming if i have a lot of requests per second.

production:
adapter: mysql
database: DB-NAME
username: USER-NAME
password: **********
host: sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net
pool: 4

I think 4 is the max connection value, or not?

Cheers,
Michael

Topic: General Discussion / Upgrade Brightbox's Ruby debs?

Hi!

I’m trying to deploy a Rails app, and it is requiring me to install RubyGems 1.3.2 Right now, the latest version available for Ubuntu Hardy from apt.brightbox.net is 1.3.1.

Just curious if there are any plans to upgrade those debs.

Thanks for hosting them!

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Hi,

I was already thinking it could be a change in the bunny API… That sounds good, I had already started patching, but would rather stick to the official release. Could you please post a message when you release the new version?

On another level, while writing and testing the patch I noticed that the test suite ist rather poor. For instance, the filters, etc. are not tested. This would make it easier to find such bugs. Do you plan on extending the test suite? I am planning on using warren for a project and this would make me feel more confident. :)

And also, this has nothing to do with warren or this issue, please, if you are going to send the password in plain text in the activation email when signing up for this forum, could you please tell the user beforehand? Something like “please be aware that we are going to send your password by email in plain text”. I would even say, just don’t store it in plain text straight away, and don’t send it either. I know my password, you don’t have to send it to me. This is something i find irritating in general.

Thanks!
Alberto.

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Had a poke around and the issue isn’t instantly obvious. A change was introduced in bunny 0.5.4rc1 (now officially released as 0.6.0) which has a knock on effect in Warren. (We’ve not moved to bunny 0.6.0 ourselves yet, so hadn’t noticed this change upstream.)

The issue is queue.pop no longer returns just the payload, but an entire hash of data about the received message, with the payload in :payload. I’m going to update warren to return the (unpacked) payload to your subscribe block, and if you want the headers then it’s a second argument passed to the block.

I’ll update warren and push out a new release depending on bunny 0.6.0 shortly.

Topic: Brightbox Help / MySQL Cluster Users

As it stands, at the moment, users of our shared clusters have a single MySQL account per Brightbox account. This is because the shared cluster uses the MySQL account name to figure out access permissions.

However, there is nothing stopping you from either running a local copy of MySQL on your Brightbox, or buying a dedicated MySQL service from us. As it is not shared, you can set up as many users as you like on these.

If you would like the dedicated service then just drop us a support ticket.

Cheers

Baz.

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Bug report from Alberto:

Hi,

i have been playing around with RabbitMQ/Warren/Bunny for the last days, but i’ve encountered problems.

The simple examples for bunny seem to send properly but there is an error when receiving the messages.

The error occurs when the YAML filter is called to unpack the message. It calls YAML.load(msg) expecting msg to be the message payload in YAML, but msg is a Ruby hash with the keys header, delivery_details and payload…

Please have a look at this pastie for more info/debug output:
http://pastie.org/747011

Is this a known bug? Perhaps something in the bunny API has chaged so that it stopped working? I was surprised that the simple examples are not working. I am evaluating warren right now and it would like to know if it’s working fine for you and there are others using/maintaining it, etc.

I can investigate and patch the code. It’s more a matter of knowing if i’m going to be on my own with this or if there are others using it that would help too, etc.

Any feedback highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Alberto

Topic: Brightbox Help / MySQL Cluster Users

Is there any way to add new users on the MySQL cluster?

I have a remote machine that needs to upload data directly to the DB using a ssh tunnel. I would like to restrict the privileges of that users since the password is store on the remote machine in plain text.

Also, if I was to host another application on my brightbox, am I forced to use the same user for both rails apps? Would this not be a security issue?

Topic: Brightbox Help / Custom HTTP Error Pages

Is it possible to customize the HTTP error pages (i.e. 404, 500) when using Passenger/Apache? Can I modify the Apache error pages and apache config or are these handled by Passenger somehow?

Thanks,
Carl