We would like to thank all of you out there for your incredible support. We are really looking forward to working for you in the future. By the way: You might have expected this anyway, but let’s make it official now. We have developped new and very exciting products which we will present early next year – so keep checking our website

We wish you a pleasant and relaxing festive season and a very successful year 2012!

Florian Jensen and Claus Kraemer

Hosting the LeWeb.net website was a challenge for us. And we want to share some of the things that went on behind the scenes of the website and what it meant for us to host it with you. It’s not every day that you get to host the official website of Europe’s most influential IT conference.

We always like a challenge, so when we were approached by the LeWeb team about hosting their website, we didn’t think twice about it. We discussed with the organizers a custom configuration of our managed hosting solution that was optimized for the LeWeb website and deployed it on one of our dedicated servers. Our professional approach worked 100% for LeWeb. We also set up a few additional resources in case we needed them. This was based on our DedicatedCloud solution. We were basically using additional frontend servers that could be fired up.

The setup was:

• 1x Dedicated Pro Hybrid as the production environment
• DedicatedCloud image ready and 2 deployed on stand-by. (weren’t used)

Come December 7, the first day of the conference, we had a peak of over 200 requests per second! coming in on the single dedicated machine, yet the machine load didn’t go over 0.1. This just goes to show that we at Flosoft.biz can have a single dedicated server (and a fallback infrastructure that we didn’t need…) handle more or less anything if we optimize the website and the webserver.

Here are some graphs and numbers we’ve gathered over the course of this week:

Requests for the week of LeWeb

The server handled 226.564 unique IPs. That means that over 226.564 unique users visited the site between 07/Dec/2011 00:00:00 CET and 09/Dec/2011 23:59:59 CET, assuming that there’s quite a few people behind a single IP (NATing). This is a huge number, and we don’t dare to speculate.

We also had a peak of 20.1Mbit/s of outgoing traffic on that machine.

The LeWeb.net network traffic graph

It was a great week for all of us here at Flosoft.biz, and we’re really looking forward to next year. We’d like to thank Loïc and Geraldine and the entire LeWeb team for organizing the most professional IT event in Europe and getting together for open discussion many of the worlds leading thinkers of our time and letting Flosoft.biz be part of this.

We hope to see you next year!

Florian Jensen & Claus E. Kraemer

Note: Some numbers aren’t showing on the graphs, as the graphs show a 5 minute average, not 1 minute average. Figures are as stated in the text.

A graph of the development.

It’s been a long long time in the works, but it’s finally here!

After nearly 6 months of intermittent work, we’re sharing the result. So you might ask, what’s new?

VPS Line-up

In 2008 we launched our VPS service. Our aim was to offer a low cost, high performance VPS that would offer you a great platform for initial developments and private use. This offer proved quite successful, so that we decided to do a small refresh in 2009 offering more memory and storage.

The new VPS Infrastructure

It’s been over 2 years now since that refresh and it’s time to bring something new to the market. So we went back to the drawing board and redesigned the complete infrastructure that hosts the VPS to offer you an amazing deal.

The new line-up still starts out at €9.99 / month but packs 1GB of RAM and 25GB of storage and kept the much beloved unlimited traffic. We also realized that the customization from the first VPS onwards was too complicated to understand, so we decided to build 5 basic VPS models where you can however still customize the largest offer to scale to whatever size you need.

So when are these launching? We’re preparing the new infrastructure for launch as we speak. The machines should be available from Monday the 12th of December for order. We’ll also offer upgrade deals for our existing VPS customers.

VPS Product Page

Dedicated Server Line-up

Flosoft.biz ❤ Dedicated Servers. We’ve updated the configurations of all models. Check them out, we’re sure there’ll be something in it for you.

We’ve now got 5 different series:

• Eco
  The Eco series is perfect for private use or as a test environment. You can get a lot of power for little money, but you’re missing out on our additional features as well as RAID.
• Startup
  The Startup series are great to get started in the world of Dedicated Servers. They offer a strong configuration with software RAID and 100Mbit/s switchport.
• Pro
  The Pro series are powerful machines offering optional hardware RAID and a lossless 1Gbit/s uplink.
• Pro+
  The Pro+ series are dual quad core machines with a high performance LSI RAID Card and a lossless 10Gbit/s uplink.
• Ultra
  As usual, the Ultra series are THE solution for your mission criticial needs. With redundant power supplies, up to 2x 10Gbit/s uplink on our lossless network and lifetime upgradeable, these machines are the best of the best.

On top of that, we’ve got the bargain bin configurations. These will be available from next week on the website as well. All of these configurations are available now.

Dedicated Server Product Page

Cloud Solutions

A dedicated server not enough? We’ll give you control of your own Datacenter powered by VMWare!

If you are interested in this solution, please contact us.

Cloud Solutions page

Jabber / XMPP & Consulting

Are you looking to build a realtime app? Do you need help scaling your business? We’re here to help!

The new Flosoft.biz Website

And that’s it! It took a while, but it’s here. Flosoft.biz’s new website!

So head on over there, and check it out!

Flosoft.biz

We’re happy to say that we’ll be there with our team and we’re looking forward to meeting many inspiring entrepreneurs and helping them scale their web activities.

We’ll also be posting updates live from LeWeb here on our Blog and on Facebook/Twitter We’ve got some surprises lined up for the week so be sure to check back.

If you’re attending LeWeb, do let us know and get in touch either on Twitter or Facebook!

Twitter: @flosoftbiz
Facebook: /flosoft

it’s been a very busy few weeks here at Flosoft.biz, but many things on our seemingly endless todo list are finally nearing completion.

Tonight, we’re launching the new Manager (Client Area).

The new Manager sees the introduction of a brand new client area design, introducing a fresh, modern and clean new look, completely rewritten to take full advantage of all the developments and improvements that are coming to Flosoft.biz.

With the new design we started from scratch, making full use of includes and CSS to reduce code replication and make customisation simpler than ever. And built based on the Bootstrap CSS framework from Twitter, it has a solid base for both cross browser compatibility, and consistent styling.

We also updated the order form, to stop asking for Server Name, Root Password and NS1 / NS2, as these values have never ever been used.

We will be adding more features to the Panel in the coming weeks and months.

We have also finally activated WorldPay as a payment gateway, accepting MasterCard, Visa, AmEx and ELV (German Bank account).
Due to this, we will be phasing out PayPal (new orders can’t be placed using it – unless you contact support).

If you have any feedback regarding all of this, please feel free to tell us.

Greets,

Florian Jensen

Budding author? Poet? Screenwriter? Or just part time scribbler? Check out Jottify: http://t.co/v7Zz3DS

September 7, 2011 10:06 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@stephenfry

Stephen Fry

The Setup

Jottify was hosted on a small Eco C-2 (29.95€ / month) dedicated server which as you might expect would normally not be able to handle a sudden impact like this on it’s own.

So we set up a custom server in front of the Eco C-2 to act as a cache for static elements as well as the pages for non logged in users. This was done using a custom compiled version of nginx using the advanced caching features and reverse proxy options.

A few tips for nginx:

The result

The tweet came and went, and the front-end server didn’t even break a sweat. The first minute we handled a peak of 18 Mbit/s (not shown in the graph above as it shows a 5 min avg.), which is a substantial amount of hits. We processed about 250.000 hits within 6 hours of the tweet going live.

This just goes to show that you can actually handle a tweet by Stephen Fry on a small Eco C-2 (kinda … ). With the Jottify community growing on a daily basis,  they have by now removed the “training wheels (the custom cache)”, and moved from the Eco series to one of our larger series to ensure that their community can grow without any hiccups in the months to come. All in all, it was a great challenge to handle such a huge peak on a small budget and we can’t wait for the next challenge!

About Jottify

Jottify is an online community which allows people to share, discuss and sell anything they have written.

The website comprises innovative tools for creating, organising and sharing literary works with the web-using world. It allows writers to categorise their works into chapters/scenes/sections and, incorporating some of the Internet’s finest open-source projects, it is a word processor tailored for writers, accessible from anywhere in the world.

http://jottify.com

following the setup of the protections against attacks on the UDP layer, the last 24 hours we didn’t have to intervene to protect our infrastructure. We received around 10 usual attacks which didn’t have any consequences for our customers.

So we think that the settings that are now in place are correct and sufficient. Quickly done, well done.

Yay! Let’s hope it lasts

In short:

• we’ve put in place a protection on all incoming traffic to our network: We limit UDP traffic to 50Mbit/s per source IP. This means, any given source IP on the internet can only send 50Mbit/s of traffic via UDP at the same time.
• We’ve put in place a limitation on the routers of the datacenters: We limit UDP traffic to 50Mbit/s per destination IP. This means, any given IP in our network can only receive 50Mbit/s of UDP traffic from the internet at any given point in time.

Just a reminder of the protections that are already in place (for the last 2 years):

• We limit ICMP and TCP/SYN traffic to 32kbit/s per source IP to our network (with a few exceptions).

There are no other protections in place, and we’re not planning to add any.

We’ve had interesting feedback from some of the customers that were being attacked that we’re happy that this is over. I believe that these additional protections offer a nice added value to our service and the services our clients offer, as it provides higher resilience. Doesn’t matter if it is a game server, a website, or just a VPS, receiving a DoS attack from a competitor is not nice. With Flosoft.biz you are now protected against the mood of your competition.

IF

you have a dedicated server

AND

it’s running Linux

AND

it’s a 64bit OS

THEN

your server is hackable!!!

It is IMPERATIVE that you update it!! Do not wait!!

The exploit is that allows people to gain root access is publicly available.

What to do?

—————

You need to update the kernel of your server.

How?

——–

- if you have our “total security” package:

You will of have gotten an E-mail with the time that we’ll reboot your server.

- If you have a machine that is running a “netboot” / Cloud kernel:

You just need to reboot your server.

- if you run your kernel off the HDD:

you need to update the kernel which you can get from:

ftp://ftp.flosoft.biz/pub/kernel/

It’s the bzImage-2.6.34.6-xxxx file

- if you compile:

the sources on Kernel.org are vulnerable. You need to patch. Only 2.6.36-RC4 is patched. (To be confirmed, this is our quick test result).

After the update of the Kernel you should have this:

# uname -a

Linux XXXXXXX 2.6.34.6-xxxx-std-ipv6-64 #3 SMP Fri Sep 17

^^^^^^^^

You need to have 2.6.34.6.

PS: As of recent, we’ve only got a single kernel (IPv4 + IPv6) called bzImage-xxxx-ipv6-xxxx

Detail:

———

A security whole (CVE-2010-3301) allowing to locally gain root access has just been (re)discovered at the 32bit emulation level on 64bit systems.

All 64bit kernels since 2.6.27 are vulnerable.

Some background: The bug was fixed in 2007 in 2.6.22.7 (CVE-2007-4573), but a regression appeared in 2008.

[ explication and exploit: http://sota.gen.nz/compat2/ ]

Regards,

Florian Jensen

this is a project near and dear to my heart.

Back in 2007 we realised that a server administration panel was a necessity for our customers. Our customer support is – as you know – excellent, and you can rely on us doing these operations for our customers within minutes. But this is one thing. Today, in the age of realtime web, people want to restart their server instantly. They want to get realtime stats of the machine, order IPs, move IPs and setup Loadbalancers themselves within seconds. So we started the Flosoft.biz Panel project.

We had a first version (0.1) late in 2007 / early 2008, some of our customers might remember it (black, grey, red), but this early system had some obvious shortcomings, so it never went past the beta stage.

So late in 2008, the idea came back around. Work started on the Panel 0.2, and we got a good base done. However, the backend of the system was not secure enough, so we scrapped that codebase too, and just kept the look and feel of it.

So, here we are. Early this year we started working on 0.3. Based off a very secure PHP framework, we built this version of the so far most promising Panel version, 0.3. The development of the Panel has been going quite quickly in the last few months, but there’s still a long road ahead of us.

Now, if you have a Dedicated Server with us, we’d like to invite you to the private alpha test of the panel.

Currently, the Panel just displays some basic server information, and gives you the option to powercycle (hard reset) it.

If you’re interested in testing this panel, please join our labs mailinglist by sending a blank mail to: labs-subscribe@flosoft-services.net

Have fun testing,

Florian Jensen&  the Flosoft.biz Team

Therefore we invite you to subscribe to our Flosoft.biz Blog offering you up-to-date information on upcoming services, expert advice on security matters, general announcements and of course a look behind the scenes. Flosoft.biz has been growing steadily, and we intend to expand further offering a range of exciting new products.

We are looking forward to sharing all Flosoft.biz news with you – and we can’t wait to hear from you with comments, ideas and suggestions!

Florian, Claus and the Flosoft.biz Team