If you’re a Debian Developer and you’re going to the annual Debian UK Barbeque we hope to see you there, and give you a beer to thank you for your hard work.

On Monday, one of our founders Pete is going to run the Boston Marathon which was the site of a terrible terrorist incident last year. You defeat terrorism by not being scared and not changing your plans, so despite the massive security inconvenience he’s gone anyway.

Last week Pete went for a run around the London Marathon course with Jeremy and Chris, as they’d always planned to turn up and together. Sadly Chris wasn’t able to make it because a fatal brain tumour in 2012 has set back his training quite badly – it’s not looking promising he’ll make the start line next year either.

So if you were feeling charitable, and wanted to win a Mythic Beasts Mug, you could make a donation to cancer research at Jeremy’s fund raising page, putting your time prediction in as a comment in the form

MB account-number 3:15:30

If you get the closest result to his finishing time we’ll send you a very limited edition Mythic Beasts Mug.

If you want some information to guide your mug winning entry, all of Pete’s training from January to March was curtailed with a foot injury. his first run back was the Cambridge Half Marathon (1:39), and last week in London did a final training run with a hang over and toilet break in 3:27:22. Last year when on form he ran 2:59:28 again in London. Boston has hills and the course is a straight line so wind conditions can make a big difference.

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.

Given just how much of our lives involves using apps, websites or embedded computers, you might think that an initiative to teach children the basics of how to create software and not just how to use it would be uncontroversial.

Well, that’s the stated goal of Year of Code, and whilst you might be able to find fault with its execution, that’s not the angle that Jeremy Paxman chose to take when interviewing Year of Code’s director, Lottie Dexter, on Newsnight last week. Instead, Paxman decided to ridicule the very notion using the curious argument that because he couldn’t understand some computer code, it was therefore meaningless, and by implication, worthless. That he can’t get his head around what code is, let alone what it means, rather confirms the importance of this initiative.

Here at Mythic Beasts we have some pretty strong views on starting coding young, so Pete took his Raspberry Pi and attempted to explain what coding is in terms that even Jeremy might understand, through the medium of a musical e-Card and via a few lines of Perl that can generate just about every pop hit ever. To read Pete’s views, or just to see a video of him playing the piano, click here.

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.

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.

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.