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.