Dear Machinists:

Welcome to another addition of our irregularly published newsletter of Rails Machine happenings. Without reservation, this is the best one yet as we’ve had a lot going on. Please read on…

I have great joy in announcing the latest member of the Rails Machine team, Dan Benjamin. Many of you know Dan from his excellent Hivelogic blog, work on Cork’d, and talks at several Rails conferences. Dan joined us as CTO this month and is helping to roll out new products and community services. Welcome aboard Dan!

After a few months of collecting and organizing the responses to 1000s of support tickets, Rob quietly launched our support wiki. There are a number of great articles on Machine tune-ups, software installation, and troubleshooting. If you haven’t already, please take a look and contribute.

A few weeks ago, we completed an upgrade and migration to our new AtlantaNAP data center infrastructure. Improvements include a new network topology based on Force10 E-series switches, consolidation of servers to our private cage space, optimization of backup infrastructure, installation of new firewall/IDS appliances and increased transparency of network traffic. In addition, we have doubled our capacity at our Internap facilities. Steve has worked tirelessly on these projects for 6 months and it looks great!

In early February, I packed up my Jeep and headed down to acts_as_conference in Orlando. Presented by Rails for All, this conference had everything that you could want in a regional conference: intimate, affordable, informative speakers, and free beer. The keynotes from Dan and Obie were inspiring. After Dan’s keynote, I threw a free party at the Ale House where the conference attendees ate and drank an impressive amount beer! Congratulations to Robert Dempsey and his team.

Speaking of conferences, in just 2 months, we’ll head out to Portland for RailsConf 2008. Dan will be speaking on Entrepreneurs on Rails and I’ll be on the Scaling Rails panel. And yes, there will be another party. Stay tuned for details.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a concept called Machinix that focuses on deploying multiple instances of the same application capturing the best traits of both SaaS and customized installations. With Dan’s help, we finally launched a site for the service and hope to spread the good word of hosted virtual appliances to the people.

Last week, we updated the Rails Machine site with our new dedicated cpu core plans. I introduced these plans in December as a special and they were a big hit. We have discontinued offering the shared CPU plans to new customers, but existing customers can upgrade as always and prices will remain frozen. If you are on a shared CPU plan, you can also upgrade to a dedicated core plan easily.

What would be an issue of the Machinist without a hosting special? This is a good one so hold on to your Aeron:

Developer Sidecar: 512mb memory, 10gb RAID 1 storage, 50gb data transfer – $500 one time fee! No monthly or setup!

The Sidecar is the perfect complement to your existing service and will make an excellent staging or development environment. We can clone any of your existing virtual servers and save you hours of setup.

In order for us to offer this insane price for a lifetime service, we have a few restrictions. This is an add-on service and your account must have another full price service. We can not provide nightly backups, SLA, refunds, additional IPs, or 10.0.x.x network access. Additional resources require a regular plan. Only one sidecar per 4GB of existing service is allowed.

There are only 50 available at this amazing price. To reserve yours, please submit a new support ticket. The Sidecar will be available next week.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

Regards, Bradley Taylor CEO – Rails Machine, LLC

We are having an informal happy hour tonight at Slice Pizza in Atlanta for Rails Machine friends, customers, vendors, and Atlanta Rubyists. Pizza and beer (or sweet tea) will be provided.

I am in Atlanta for a few days doing pointy-haired boss stuff and would love to meet up.

What: Rails Machine Happy Hour
When: Friday, February 1. 6pm-??
Where: Slice Pizza (bar side) [map]
1025 Howell Mill Rd
Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 817-7153

Hope to see you there!

If you’re in the southeast, be sure to boogie on down to acts_as_conference in Orlando. You’ll get to meet lots of great people, listen to talks, and come to a fabulous Rails Machine party!

On Friday night, we’ll be hosting free beer and appetizers in the Pool Room at the Ale House on Kirkland following Dan Benjamin’s keynote.

Yesterday, we placed our orders for the give one, get one program from One Laptop Per Child. If you haven’t ordered yours, you only have a few more weeks!

The railsmachine gem has been updated for Capistrano 2 compatibility. Better late than never, right?

capify .
railsmachine -A . -n yourapp -d yourdomain.com
cap repos:setup
cd ..\yourapp_machine
cap servers:setup deploy:cold

task :after_deploy, :roles => :app do
  # ...
end

namespace :custom do
  task :update, :roles => :app do
    # ...
  end
end
after :deploy, 'custom:update'

In a few hours, Rob and I will be headed to Charlotte for RubyConf. If you are going to be there, please email us so I can give you updates on special events (free beer) and a customer appreciation dinner on Saturday night. We should arrive around 7pm if anyone wants to meet for drinks later tonight.

In honor of RubyConf, I’m going to run a special on hosting plans with dedicated cpu cores on my new 8-core Xeon servers.

1 dedicated cpu core, 1gb memory, 50GB RAID 10 storage, 125GB transfer, 1-4 virtual servers. Regularly: $250/month + $250/setup. Special: $2500/year + $250/setup. Save $500!

2 dedicated cpu cores, 2gb memory, 100GB RAID 10 storage, 250GB transfer, 1-8 virtual servers. Regularly: $350/month + $350/setup. Special: $3500/year + $350/setup. Save $700!!

4 dedicated cpu cores, 4gb memory, 200GB RAID 10 storage, 500GB transfer, 1-10 virtual servers. Regularly: $550/month + $550/setup. Special: $5500/year + $550/setup. Save $1100!!!!

These specials end Sunday night! Please contact me for more information.

Rob and I have GIS backgrounds. Before I persuaded him to come work at Rails Machine, he was working on internet mapping projects for government agencies. Before I persuaded myself to drop out, I worked for ESRI. We both love maps.

After a month or two of wandering around downtown, we decided to collect some short thoughts on the fine establishments that we visit. If you ever come to Savannah, be sure to check these places out.

Update: For more options, explore this Savannah dining guide created by our pals at Morris Technologies.

One of the fun things about living in a cozy-sized town is that occasionally I get asked to speak to local groups about the internet and related matters. For the second time, I was asked to speak to Leadership Savannah during a panel on information and technology. The panel also included Murray Wilson of tps, Jim Goodlett of Morris Technology, and Dan Suwyn of Rapid Change.

Last year I spoke on Web 2.0ish kinds of stuff, so this year I decided to change up the style and content. The talk presented the strategies used by small internet companies that are successful and competitive despite their size and lack of huge sums of funding.

My focus on small, home-grown tactical companies was a nice contrast to a presentation by Jason Burr from ATDC who adeptly represented the more traditional approach of marrying giant sacks of VC with ideas from research institutes. Hopefully the class gained some insight from both approaches in the context of the future of our fair city.

Speaking of VC, Jim mentioned a notable Machinist, thefunded.com, as a useful resource for those looking to explore funding options. TheFunded is built and maintained by the singular and mysterious Founding Member and hosted on a Rails Machine. This is a fine example of the power of small teams.

The presentation was rather short, but has some nice pictures. Take a look.

We (my wife and I) arrived in Berlin last night and went over to brautwurst on rails. It was a fun event with good beer and great brats. I always looking catching up with people that I only seem to see at conferences.

Today, we explored some of the city and did the tourist thing a bit, but more importantly tried to get a peak at life in Berlin. There’s something very vibrant about the city and it appeals to me greatly. Standing on the cobblestone marking where the wall used to be gave me great feeling about how the cultural landscape can morph with the will of the people.

On Wednesday night, I would like to invite all Machinists in Berlin out for a customer appreciation dinner. Please RSVP to bradley at railsmachine dot com. Thanks!

Last night I arrived in beautiful Tucson, Arizona for the KVM Forum 2007. This is the first gathering of the community surrounding the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project. The agenda is impressive with speakers from the development team, Intel, IBM, AMD, and others. The event is presented by Qumranet, the company supporting the KVM open source project.

As you may remember, I mentioned KVM in this article. Although Rails Machine’s virtualization infrastructure is based on Xen and CentOS, my local development environment is powered by Ubuntu and KVM (on a Thinkpad X60s and a home built Core 2 Quad).

So, why is KVM different? It leverages the hardware virtualization support in recent processors and uses the linux kernel as the hypervisor. This approach leads to a small implementation and easy integration. You can get up and running with KVM with simple package install commands on Ubuntu. It does not require an entire toolset that reimplements the functions of the operating system. For example, with KVM you can use the standard linux process tools like ‘ps’ and ‘top’ to manage virtual server processes. Read more about it in the kvm whitepaper.

KVM development is moving at a blistering pace. The patchset was introduced in October 2006 and merged into the kernel in December. With less than a year of development, the KVM team has added features and capabilities that has taken others much longer. Combined with the commitment to Linux and open source, KVM has an exciting future ahead.

Dear Machinists:

This state of the machine contains a number of announcements and status updates on the current state of Rails Machine. It also contains information on free beer and hosting add-ons (please read on!).

New Team Member
As Rails Machine has grown from a vision to a full-blown company with over 300 machinists using over 500 virtual servers, I haven’t been as timely with software updates, documentation, and community resources as I would like. Running the company has detracted from my ability to code and write. For several months, I have been searching for a Support Lead to further my vision for empowering developers. Given the quality and detail of support that we provide, it has been quite difficult to find someone with the magic combination of administration, development, and communications skills. Fortunately, I was able to find someone here in Savannah.

Next week, Rob Lingle will be joining Rails Machine to lead the charge on an extensive customer portal and control panel. This is very exciting and I’m looking forward to releasing great tools and resources for you. Even though Rob will be handling the majority of support issues, I intend to remain as accessible as possible to you when needed.

New Headquarters
The first week in September, Rob and I will be moving into the new RM HQ in a 160 year old building on Oglethorpe Square in the Savannah Historic District. Having been a “virtual” company for a year and a half, it feels great to put down roots in our own space. After getting settled, I would like to provide a library and learning lab to promote open source software and education for those in the city that would not otherwise have access to this technology. Stay tuned for more information on an open house for those in the region.

Datacenter Upgrades
In Atlanta, we’re continuing to build out our private cage in the AtlantaNAP. This project has taken much longer than I expected, but the wait will be worth it. In the next week, we should receive our brand new switching infrastructure based on the E-Series from Force10 Networks. We anticipate a major improvement in network service as we will be able to manage traffic at the IP address level and also aggregate multiple upstream feeds. Once the new switching infrastructure is installed and tested, we will migrate existing servers from our three cabinets in the data center. I’ll send out the announcements on when this will occur in a few weeks. As always, we will do our best to minimize down time for this major upgrade.

Recent Network Outage
As you may have noticed, a portion of you in the 207 subnet experienced network downtime on Friday morning and very briefly Saturday. This outage was aresult of a timed denial of service attack that flooded our network. The compromised machine was located and disabled. To prevent and mitigate such attacks in the future, we are installing better network gear to improve the visibility of such attacks and negate them as quickly as possible. In addition, we are configuring better failover and notification for support services. Internap based servers and those on other subnets were not affected.

This attack resulted from a non-privileged user account being compromised due to a poor password. Please take a few seconds to make sure that you are using strong passwords on both simple users and the deploy account. As many of you are using SSH keys, it isn’t a big deal to use a completely unintelligible password as you do not have to type it anyway.

Europe
In September, I will be traveling to Berlin for RailsConf Europe. As with Portland, I would like to meet all of you and host a party for our European machinists. Please let me know if you will attending the conference. If you are familiar with Berlin, I’d love some recommendations on a cool spot for the event. I’m also researching data centers in Europe and am looking for volunteers from different countries to test network performance.

Free Backups
Over the past several months, we have been quietly testing a nightly backup system based on LVM snapshots. Unfortunately, this system has exposed a few bugs at the OS level and a few of the larger servers have needed reboots. At this point, we feel confident about the system and I am proud to announce that this service will be provided for free to all existing customers. So, not only is your data on a RAID 1 or 10 storage subsystem, it is also being copied to a 7TB RAID 5 array every night. If you are currently running your own backups, I recommend keeping them and using them for offsite backups. Please submit a support request if you require a restore from our snapshots. Thanks to Steve for a great implementation.

Free Mail and DNS
In addition to backups, I would also like to offer all current customers free DNS and one pop3/imap4 mailbox. For DNS, please submit your requests via the ticket system and I will provide name servers. If you would like a fully functional email on address on railsmachina.com, you may request it via the ticket system as well. Please be patient as it may take a few days to process the initial requests.

Internap Dedicated Special
For those interested in the Internap facility, I’m currently offering a limited number of dedicated 4gb, dual core servers with 250GB RAID storage for $500/month ($500/setup). These servers are running Xen and managed by us. You can create up to 15 virtual machines and define your own images for speedy deployment. Considering other hosts charge the same for a 4GB VPS, this is a deal! Contact me for more information.

Thanks
In closing, the Machine is trucking along great. We’re growing at a healthy, managed rate. We are also profitable and well financed by the amazing (and local) Darby Bank. You don’t need to worry about waiting lists or prepayment tricks to get service from us. If you need to grow, we have plenty of servers and data center space to accommodate your needs regardless of size.

If you have any questions or concerns about the these items or anything else, please get in touch. I would like to thank you for supporting Rails Machine and helping it grow. Many of you have been with me since the beginning and I hope have many more years to come.

Regards,
Bradley Taylor
Owner – Rails Machine, LLC

My talk on deploying Rails on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn had a good turnout. Given the size of the conference, it was great to see the number of people interested in Rails. You can find the slides here. I also had some nice discussions with folks from Canonical about Rails support in Ubuntu. I really apprieciate their enthusiasm about the future of Ubuntu server and look forward to rolling out some virtual servers shortly.

On Sunday, I was was able to spend a few minutes with Luke Kanies and spoke with him about Puppet. I think there are some interesting possibilities on how we could integrate Puppet into our default virtual machine images to provide easy access for customers to recipes for different kinds of common installs like mod_dav_svn, Trac, PHP, etc. Stay tuned for more in this area.

Tonight I’ll head over to FOSCON presented by PDX.rb.

In a few minutes, I’m headed off to hear the opening keynotes for Ubuntu Live. If you’re also at the conference or in Portland for OSCON, shoot me an email and we’ll grab a beer! I also have some t-shirts if you didn’t get one at RailsConf.

Here is the latest news from the Machine…

• We’re hiring Rails developers to work in Savannah on customer support and some really cool new virtualization products.

• The happy hour in the ATL was a blast and eventually migrated to a nearby blues joint for a few more pitchers. Thanks to all for coming out.

• I’ll be speaking on Rails at UbuntuLive in a few weeks. We should be launching Ubuntu-based virtual servers by then.

• We’ll be at RailsConf Europe in Berlin. Stay tuned for details on a party for the European customers.

• If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the awesome Rails ads from Machinist Gregg Pollack.

• We’re sponsoring the July Hackfest. Prizes include free rails hosting. A few Machinists are currently in the top 34 with Gabe da Silveira currently in the top ten. Get ‘em! The rest of you still have time to make an impact.

• For a limited time, you can get a 4gb dedicated server running Xen (aka XenMachine), for $475/month with $475 setup. This server will support upto 15 custom virtual machines. Existing customers can easily migrate their virtual servers to dedicated hardware with no system changes and only 5 minutes of downtime per VPS. For more information, contact us. Why have a slice when you can have the whole pie!

We are having an informal happy hour this Thursday at Slice Pizza in Atlanta for Rails Machine friends, customers, vendors, and Atlanta Rubyists. Pizza and beer (or sweet tea) will be provided.

I am in Atlanta for a few days doing data center stuff and would love to meet up.

What: Rails Machine Happy Hour
When: Thursday, June 7. 6pm-??
Where: Slice Pizza (bar side) [map]
1025 Howell Mill Rd
Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 817-7153

Please RSVP so I can make sure no one goes hungry or thirsty.