With DynDNS shutting down their free dynamic DNS service quite a few customers contacted us to ask for an upgrade to our DNS API so that it can effortlessly substitute in for DynDNS. For example we saw this request over twitter.

@Mythic_Beasts dyndns is closing its free dynamic dns service (*major internet trauma*). Could you write a blog post about what MB offers?

— David Earl (@frankshad) April 8, 2014

Several people offered a suggested implementation. They all asked for something along these lines,

Can you make it so that when you put an update for an A record through
it can substitute in the calling IP address instead of supplying one.

It’s clear that many of our customers still don’t instinctively get the implications of dual stack hosting yet.

In particular if you call the API from a v6 address and ask for an update to your A record it will fail because it doesn’t know your v4 address. Similarly if you call it from a v4 address and ask for an update to your AAAA record, it will also fail for precisely the same reason. You have to call the API to update your A or AAAA record over the correct v4/v6 channel in order to get the correct update, and if you’re dual stack you need to call it twice.

We decided that we should fasttrack this project, and gave it to Liam Fraser – who’s back with us during his Easter holidays. We’re proud to present our fully documented and enhanced Dynamic DNS API which sample code for single (v4 or v6) and dual (v4 and v6) stack hosts.

We include our DNS API free of charge for anyone who’s bought a domain name from us, so if you’d like to use our Dynamic DNS service, create an account at our control panel and follow the instructions.

If you’re bored of working for a company where you can’t get things done, and would like to work somewhere where you can implement, test, document and release a small enhancement in about six hours, you can apply for a job with us here. We’re especially interested in talented graduates and school leavers who know their Linux.

How to bring up remote desktop on Mac OS X without having a mouse so that you can operate the machine remotely:

option + spacebar, type terminal

This opens spotlight and starts a terminal.

sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on

This enables ssh so you can log in remotely.

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all

This enables remote desktop so you can log in from another mac, and use the mouse on that one to finish the rest of your configuration.

The Tower Bridge Lifeboat station put up a picture on Twitter of what London would look like today if the Thames Barrier wasn’t closed.

I’ve annotated it with the four biggest nodes from the London Internet Exchange.

It’s not known exactly what fraction of UK Internet traffic passes through these four buildings, but almost every major ISP or content provider exchanges traffic there, Mythic Beasts, Facebook, Twitter, Google, BT, Virgin, Yahoo, Microsoft, Akamai, Netflix, Talktalk, BSkyB, Vodafone, and hundreds of others. Very slowly regional exchanges are starting to be built, largely by LINX itself.

This morning one of our routers in our Cambridge data centre stopped reporting bandwidth data to our billing system. We investigated and whilst it was still routing packets without issue, it appeared to be experiencing hardware failure.

We’ve powered the router down, pending full investigation on our data centre visit this afternoon. Currently all traffic from our Cambridge site is being handled by our other router. This seamlessly failed over with no customer impact.

Depending on your choice of terminology ‘Redundancy has been reduced to N’, or ‘The network is at-risk’. In Mythic Beasts we like to speak English so this translates to, if something else fails before the router is restored to service, there is a risk of a network outage to our Cambridge data centre.

Update : Friday 31st we fully restored our network to it’s usual redundant configuration by replacing the router with a similarly over specified replacement. Customers may have received free bandwidth for some of this period.

Here’s an unsolicited customer review of a migration of a dedicated server to one of our managed virtual machines from Alex at raspi.tv who’s building a 9inch HDMI 1080p screen.

New Year, New Server At mythic Beasts

You can find the original twitter conversation at @Mythic_Beasts.

Our latest blog post is on the Raspberry Pi website. Coping with Christmas

Today we’ve upgraded both of our connections to the London Internet Exchange (LINX) from 1Gbps to 10Gbps.

Over the past few weeks we’ve repeatedly broken the company bandwidth record. And since we’ve recently secured more peering agreements — including every major UK connectivity provider — a greater proportion of our traffic is now going out over LINX. So at peak times our bandwidth usage has been enough that in the unlikely event of a failure of one of the LINX LANs, we would have come close to running out of capacity on our other link. Clearly an upgrade was in order!

Our network engineers performed the upgrade this morning, with no disruption as traffic was automatically and transparently rerouted during the brief down time. After the upgrade, we have 10Gbps from our data centre in Telecity Sovereign House to LINX Juniper; and 10Gbps from our Harbour Exchange data centre to LINX Extreme.

In the event of the failure of either link or router, traffic will automatically reroute around our internal fibre ring to our other site and out to the peering exchange via our other connection. And, for the time being, we have plenty of capacity to spare.

After cloning a server for a customer we noticed that something was a little bit odd:

# md5sum /etc/sudoers

worked fine but:

# sudo -l

responded with:

sudo: unable to stat /etc/sudoers: Permission denied

How odd we thought. More odd was:

# su - username
Cannot execute /bin/bash: Permission denied

A bit of time with Google and strace revealed that we’d managed to set the permissions on / wrongly:

drwx------  27 root root  4096 Jun  4 11:48 ..

rather than:

drwxr-xr-x  27 root root  4096 Jun  4 11:48 ..

What amazed us was not that the machine didn’t work properly but that we could log in at all.

If this is the sort of problem you’d be able to fix, you should look at our jobs page. If you’d like someone else to fix it for you then our Managed hosting is probably of a lot more interest.

Over the past week or so we’ve given the Science Media Centre a hand in moving their WordPress site into a virtual machine hosted by Mythic Beasts. They’re a charity who work with journalists, scientists and engineers to try and improve the quality of science reporting and removing the misleading rubbish that otherwise gets written. Mythic Beasts is a company founded by science graduates who are very easily angered by terrible science articles in the papers. We’re hoping the saving on destroyed laptops and monitors will easily cover all the management and consultancy services we’ve donated.

If we have fewer idiotic articles proving that Coffee cures cancer^* and Coffee causes cancer^* and rather more articles that our talented university friends pioneer new cancer treatments we’ll consider the time and effort we’ve put in to helping them well spent.

* Actual links removed in the name of good taste. Here’s something more interesting to read, and if you’re still curious, you can look up coffee in the index.

Today is Guy Fawkes Night, when traditionally in the UK we launch fireworks to commemorate not blowing up King James I, the House of Lords and a large chunk of central London. Most modern firework displays use rather less gunpowder than the original plot in 1605.

At Mythic Beasts we think with the advent of four hundred years additional technology we should be aiming a bit higher. That’s why instead of buying fireworks we’ve donated some hosting to Southampton University Spaceflight. Certainly I (Pete) was incredibly inspired as a child by space flight and I remember watching the first untethered spacewalk as a child which motivated me strongly to learn all about rockets and space ships and from there to reverse engineer 8 bit computer games ultimately leading to running a hosting company.

This is of course the second university space program we’re helping out with – some of the tracking for Cambridge University Spaceflight is also done on servers hosted with us.