I was in Barnes & Noble and was looking hard to find a book about something I didn't already master (or at least hadn't already bought a book about)... and I found it!

Programming Erlang.  As a pseudo-mathematician, I must say -- wow.  I love languages like Lisp, and now Erlang, that really get down, dirty, and relatively close to the theory.  Loops?  Forget them!  Variable variables? Forget them!  Recursion?  Embrace it!  Anonymous functions and Lambda definitions?  Embrace them!  Sounds strange?  Sure, but its refreshing, but do take my opinion with a grain of salt -- I used to program in TCL ;-)

Needless to say, I'm looking now at web development and hosting solutions around Erlang... Yaws, ErlyWeb, and Erlang Web.  Most likely, we'll be supporting these in short order.

By default, we do not upgrade customer's Rails applications to newer releases of Rails.  We have noticed that a large number of customers haven't been upgrading, and just want to make sure that customers know how to do so!

Simply edit your application's config/environment.rb as such to specify the version you would like to upgrade to:
-RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.1.6'

+RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.1.1'

Then, run 'rake rails:update' from with in your application's directory.


Notable upgrades for you would be:
 1.2.0
 1.2.6
 2.0.0
 2.0.4
 2.1.0
 2.1.1

Other versions can be available as well, but these are the earliest and latest point-releases available within each major release at the time of this writing.

We've had a few customers asking about why their Django admin interface is no longer working, since the upgrade to Django 1.0.

Changes in Django 1.0 required a couple changes to the url.py file in order to access the admin view.  Here is an example of how to modify the file:

# Add following lines for 1.0 compat, to top of file
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib import admin
import os
admin.autodiscover()

# and then under urlpatterns, eg:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # Remove old entry, eg:
    # (r'^admin/', include('django.contrib.admin.urls')),
    # Add new entry, eg:
     ('^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),

Python 2.6 and 3.0 will soon be released, and it is important that this transition is as smooth as possible.  To facilitate that, we ask that customers please make sure that all of their scripts (including their Zope startup script) refer to a specific python version, a la: "/usr/bin/python2.4"

For compatability, we've left Python 2.4 as the default on our servers.  Soon, python 2.5 or even 2.6 will be the default.  We do warn that if customers do not specify a specific Python executable, they may automatically be switched to newer Python releases as they become available.

Our support department will gladly assist customers prior to, and during the upgrade & migration period.

We have finally released GrokThis Manager 2.0 for our Advanced and Traditional hosting customers!  It has been a very long time coming, and in fact it has been ready for some time.  The significant change is that it is now web-based.   The console version ('gt_manager') remains active and functional.

To access, login at:

 https://secure.grokthis.net/manager/

This is NOT for VPS hosting, although we plan to integrate Xen VPS management at some point.

Tested in IE 7 and Firefox 3.  Should work in Firefox 2.0, probably not in IE6...

With our upcoming IP address changes, we are having a number of customers asking about how to keep their site functional when the old IPs drop off.

The simple answer: DNS TTL.

Before the upgrade, simply lower the TTL on your DNS records to something low (say 15 minutes, or 900 seconds).  After the upgrade, restore the TTL to its previous setting (say, 28800 or 8 hours).  Doing this, users should be directed to the wrong IP for no more than 15 minutes.

We will attempt to implement this for records on our nameservers on the behalf of customers.

While we have already patched our DNS servers for the widely discussed vulnerability; we are concerned that we may have a number of customers that have not patched their servers.

We do advise that all customers update to the latest available version of Bind9, Djbdns, or whatever other DNS server that they may be running.  This can normally be done via yum or apt; When doing so, please make sure that the security repositories are enabled in your package manager.

Recently, some users of vps008 have noticed that they cannot complete a reinstall/reimage of Debian or Ubuntu.  We resolved the initial complaints by a reboot.   Unfortunately, on a VPS server with many customers on it, it can take over an hour to complete a reboot cycle.  We hoped that this would not be a recurring issue, but could not be certain of it.

Now, we are noticing that this behavior is, in fact, recurring.  Shortly after a reboot, for the following days or weeks, the server will operate normally, but will eventually begin to hang running the configuration for console-setup during a debootstrap installation.

At this point, most customers will eventually close their SSH sessions, and try again to reimage their VPS.  When reimaging again, they will get an error that their filesystem is already mounted.   This happens because the previous installation never completed.

When our support is contacted, we can stop the prior installation, but without a (time-consuming, service affecting) reboot we cannot provide much further immediate assistance.  We can then schedule to reboot the server at a more appropriate time when the service interruption would be less significant to the many other customers that are sharing that host.

We are currently investigating alternative solutions for running the reimages that would not trigger, or be affected by, this bug.  Additionally, we are attempting to obtain some assistance from the Xen and Linux developers.

This is a quick notice that we are asking that customers hold off from upgrading GCC to version 4.3 at this time.  A problem exists in all current Linux releases (from all vendors) which renders GCC 4.3.0 and higher incompatible.  A kernel update will be provided shortly to resolve this issue.

UPDATE: all should now be okay in 2.6.26.5