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Updated access procedures have been introduced to further improve security at Reynolds House. As of Wednesday 2nd June visitors requiring unaccompanied access to the facility are requested to sign in at Reynolds House, as opposed to the previous procedure of signing in at Turing House. Please note that there are no changes to the online/SMS access request system (The Server Hotel, ground floor) which you should continue to use as normal, prior to your visit.

1st Easy have been pushing for improvements to access at Reynolds House for several years, and the moving of security services across to Reynolds brings two major benefits to you, your colocation services and Reynolds House as a whole:

1. Security is now based within the datacentre building on a 24/7/365 basis – a major security enhancement.

2. Access is now much simpler, with no need to check-in/check-out at Turing before and after a visit.

We hope these improvements are equally seen as a benefit to yourselves.

If you require further clarification or have any access problems, please call our support line (free from a UK landline) on 0808 222 2221 or raise a support ticket with our team via support@1steasy.com.

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We’ve just finished rolling out upgrades to Ruby Enterprise Edition on our shared Rails servers to protect against the BigDecimal vulnerability listed at ruby-lang.org

All our shared Rails hosting accounts are now protected against this vulnerability.

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We have just sent out an announcement to our colo customers notifying you that we will be moving one of our nameservers (dns3.1steasy.net) to a different network. I’m just posting it up here too for reference.

Please note that this only really applies to colocation customers, or those who have unmanaged servers that we have no access to. This does not affect any managed server customers, as we will make the necessary changes for you.

If you are using the 1st Easy nameservers for DNS resolution on any of your colocated equipment, you will need to update the IP address of this nameserver on the 17th June.

The specifics of this IP change are as follows:

Current IP of dns3.1steasy.net: 85.113.86.215
New IP of dns3.1steasy.net: 212.84.76.215

If you do not make this change on the 17th, you may find that DNS resolving slows down as requests to the old dns3.1steasy.net IP address time out.

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We have just had an issue with one of our routers losing it’s configuration settings. We have now reverted to a backup system.

Apologies for the interruption, it looks like this took down several switches for around 9 minutes.

UPDATE: We have now fixed the faulty router and so will be switching back to our dual-router setup now. There will be another small outage of 1 or 2 minutes while this is done.

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We are currently experiencing some intermittent network issues, which appear to be related to some problems that are happening down at LINX this morning.

We will update the blog as we find out more.

UPDATE 11:09AM: The problem is actually due to an issue with our network provider’s routers in Manchester. The problem is being investigated.

UPDATE 11:15AM: The problem was due to a fibre fault between Telehouse London and Telecity Manchester. This has now been fixed by the relevant parties.

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If you have an account on one of our French servers, you may be having intermittent access issues at this time. We have a ticket open with our French server providers and are looking into the issue now.

We will keep this post updated with progress.

3:30PM – The server has now been up (and has stayed up) since just after 2PM. We have spoken to the French supplier and believe this issue is now fully resolved.

12:56PM – The server is down again. We apologise for the inconvenience, it looks like our supplier is having extreme difficulties today.

12:34PM – The server is back up. However, we are not getting any feedback from the French hosts, so do not know whether the problem is fully solved yet.

11:38AM – The server is currently down again. We are waiting for a response from the French providers.

10:47AM – The server is now back online.

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We are currently seeing very poor network performance to our servers located in France. The route is not completely down, but is showing about 80% packet loss.

If you have a site on one of our French servers you may be seeing issues at this time.

We will keep this post updated.

UPDATE: The network appears to have been stable since about 2PM.

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We’ve been busy upgrading and improving again! Passenger 2.1.2, Ruby On Rails 2.3 and Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6 (REE) have all been installed on our shared Rails hosting servers.

The installation of REE should solve any problems for those of you who required Ruby 1.8.6 (as opposed to the 1.8.5 version that comes with CentOS 5) for certain gems to work. The upgraded Passenger should also fix some of the mod_rewrite issues that you may have experienced, but our main reason for upgrading Passenger was to allow us to support the new Rails 2.3 release which has just been officially released today.

While REE has been setup so that Passenger runs your Rails apps with it, if you want to use it from within your SSH environment, there are a couple of little tweaks that you need to do. Just open a ticket and we’ll tell you how to achieve this.

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I’ve just been trying out running a Sinatra application on our Passenger servers and can confirm that Sinatra apps can now be hosted by 1st Easy!

If you aren’t sure what what Sinatra is, check out the intro at sintatrarb.com. If you want to create a small Ruby-based web application for which the full Rails stack would be overkill, then try it out.

Sinatra hosting is available right now on any Rails hosting account (as an alternative to Rails at this point – more research is required to see if we can run this alongside a Rails app). The (incredibly simple) deployment instructions will be added to our Knowledge Base shortly.

If you have a Rails-enabled dedicated server and would like to be able to run Sinatra apps on there too, just submit a ticket and we’ll sort it out for you.

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We have just installed the latest Rails 2.2 gem onto our shared and managed Rails hosting servers. Apache has been restarted (and also upgraded to the latest release) so mod_rails/passenger is now ready to serve your apps using this version if you are using the 2.2 branch.

To use this version, just modify your environment.rb file so that your RAILS_GEM_VERSION is set to 2.2, then restart your app as outlined in our Knowledge Base:

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.2'

As always, if you you have any queries about upgrading your app, just open a ticket at http://support.1steasy.com

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