# Stallion 2 - pictures and daily updates :)



## Francisco (May 15, 2013)

Hello everyone,

To continue my thread from LET, Stallion 2 is our new control panel that will not only replace our VPS controls, but in time replace WHMCS.

Some key features on the way:

- Affordable hosted load balancers

- Anycast IP addresses with IP routing (so you don't 'have' to buy VM's in each location)

- Proper /64 allocations (will likely be available right after the initial release)

- Full merging of billing/support rolls into the panel. This will keep things really straight forward for users to signup

- JAVA based console controls replaced with novnc, a javascript/HTML5 based console

- Floating IP's support so you can run your own heartbeat deployment between both OpenVZ & KVM's wtihin a single location

- Personal media storage for ISO's and possibly OpenVZ templates

There's lots of other things going in place that I won't bother listing 

You're welcome to demo the current release at:

URL - http://209.141.39.7/

LOGIN - testpony

PASSWORD - demo

If you visit http://209.141.39.7/vserver/1, you'll see a completely working OpenVZ based VPS. /overview stats reload every 15 seconds keeping pretty well 'live'. Reinstalling, root password setting, enabling ips and the likes are all working.

Given how things are progressing, we fully expect to be rolling the panel out early next month. Aldryic is currently working on the WHMCS module.

The IP it currently has is live to the world so you can ssh in and see that reinstalls/etc work.

IP's are fully logged, though, so if you abuse I'll have Aldryic on your ass.



Francisco


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## Francisco (May 15, 2013)

The latest work committed was bandwidth accounting. While Stallion 1's revision of the code was good enough, I decided to redo it, chopping down the amount of math we were having to do.

You're welcome to pull a cachefly/speedtest.buyvm.net and see that it will commit. Bandwidth is updated every 20 minutes so give it a few 

Today i'll be testing & debugging KVM controls. Once I got these working I'll setup a test VM for people to fiddle with.

Francisco


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## mojeda (May 15, 2013)

Good work Francisco.


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## mnpeep (May 15, 2013)

So what's up with the USSR logo at the top-left? Is Aldyric adding some of his touches to the panel? From what I've seen most immigrants from Russia don't like being there any more (for many reasons ofc). Anyways, nice panel! How can I move my 4 VPSes to it? :3


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## mojeda (May 15, 2013)

mnpeep said:


> So what's up with the USSR logo at the top-left? Is Aldyric adding some of his touches to the panel? From what I've seen most immigrants from Russia don't like being there any more (for many reasons ofc). Anyways, nice panel! How can I move my 4 VPSes to it? :3


I think in the LET thread he said that people were joking around about it in #Frantech so Francisco did it as a joke.


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## Francisco (May 15, 2013)

mnpeep said:


> So what's up with the USSR logo at the top-left? Is Aldyric adding some of his touches to the panel? From what I've seen most immigrants from Russia don't like being there any more (for many reasons ofc). Anyways, nice panel! How can I move my 4 VPSes to it? :3


 


mojeda said:


> I think in the LET thread he said that people were joking around about it in #Frantech so Francisco did it as a joke.


:3
We were having a discussion in our staff chat network about how we're pretty much following communist views given our 'everyone is fair and equal'. I decided to add the USSR symbol to continue the joke. Aldryic was cackling like mad <_<

Francisco


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## Eased (May 15, 2013)

Wow. First time I have seen this! Looks great.


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## The_Hatta (May 15, 2013)

Francisco said:


> :3
> 
> 
> We were having a discussion in our staff chat network about how we're pretty much following communist views given our 'everyone is fair and equal'. I decided to add the USSR symbol to continue the joke. Aldryic was cackling like mad <_<
> ...


wait WHAT Aldryic cackles, I thought he only Neighed, >_>


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## Francisco (May 15, 2013)

The_Hatta said:


> wait WHAT Aldryic cackles, I thought he only Neighed, >_>


That cackle is always before the *unzip*.
Always.



Francisco


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 15, 2013)

The neighing is my pillowtalk.


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## Francisco (May 15, 2013)




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## WelltodoInformalCattle (May 16, 2013)

Looks great so far!


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)

WelltodoInformalCattle said:


> Looks great so far!


Thanks 
I'll see if I can get the KVM side tested and rolled out today.

Francisco


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## Kalam (May 16, 2013)

Looking good Francisco. I noticed that you have an API key and hash, do they currently do anything and what will be possible with it?


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## Nick (May 16, 2013)

Kalam said:


> Looking good Francisco. I noticed that you have an API key and hash, do they currently do anything and what will be possible with it?


From what *I've heard*, it works the same as SolusVM.


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)

Nick said:


> From what *I've heard*, it works the same as SolusVM.


Kind of.
I'll write a proxy that will allow solusvm clients to connect to it and get the data in an XML format.

I'll have a version based API, so you'd have:

/api/client/v1/

/api/client/v2/

etc

Francisco


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## Nick (May 16, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Kind of.
> 
> 
> I'll write a proxy that will allow solusvm clients to connect to it and get the data in an XML format.
> ...


Would be awesome to have complete control (reinstall, change root password, etc...) of the VMs and maybe a central API so you don't require a separate key and hash for each VM. *hint* resellers.


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## Coastercraze (May 16, 2013)

Looks ponylicious to me.


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## drmike (May 16, 2013)

- Affordable hosted load balancers

- Anycast IP addresses with IP routing (so you don't 'have' to buy VM's in each location)

Are these going to be available soon?

Great features I can really use.

Looking forward to the release and new features.


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)

buffalooed said:


> - Affordable hosted load balancers
> 
> - Anycast IP addresses with IP routing (so you don't 'have' to buy VM's in each location)
> 
> ...


A ways out.
We're still wanting to look into getting a Europe location online after the release of the panel but we're not sure.

Features may be in higher demand than a euro buyvm.

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)

Nick said:


> Would be awesome to have complete control (reinstall, change root password, etc...) of the VMs and maybe a central API so you don't require a separate key and hash for each VM. *hint* resellers.


That wouldn't be very hard to integrate. I'd just have to adjust the API table and store a type field.
Add it to the bug report 

Francisco


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## netnub (May 16, 2013)

Francisco, once Strallion 2 is done, you should throw Strallion 1 on github, but make it private repo and only select a few people to have access, kinda like a VIP thing.


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## maxexcloo (May 16, 2013)

I'm liking this, awesome work boss!


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 16, 2013)

netnub said:


> Francisco, once Strallion 2 is done, you should throw Strallion 1 on github, but make it private repo and only select a few people to have access, kinda like a VIP thing.


We were debating simply dumping the source for anyone that wanted it - but honestly, that would only cause more basement dwellers to decide starting a VPS company over summer break would be a good idea -_-;


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## maxexcloo (May 16, 2013)




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## Aldryic C'boas (May 16, 2013)

maxexcloo said:


> Make it require actual skill to install


mmm... I suppose I could rewrite it in Perl, and require some obscure modules :3


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)




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## PwnyExpress (May 16, 2013)

No

Release it on github AND

License it under the BSD

Then SolusVM may or may not exrcete bricks


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## George_Fusioned (May 16, 2013)




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## maxexcloo (May 16, 2013)

You should follow my lead and write it entirely in BASH. Fun will be had!

</neverdothis>


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## Zen (May 16, 2013)

I've heard people request that S1 be released, given out to select people, bla bla. Why not simply make it an open source project and allow people to add on to it - or do that for S2. I know S2 is in BuyVM's mind probably secret sauce but its a decent idea nevertheless.

S1 or S2 open source would be truly awesome, because I have no doubt people would contribute.


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 16, 2013)

Zen said:


> S1 or S2 open source would be truly awesome, because I have no doubt people would contribute.


While very true, it would be rather counter-productive, as the primary reason we're doing the panel is to break free of the "low end" mold.    We'd briefly discussed releasing a public version of S2 (without the new features we're adding).. but that would honestly just be too much extra work, and would really only result in other panels getting upset at losing money and possibly making rash decisions, or a very large influx of summer hosts who would have one less thing to pay for before they could start reselling from rented gear.


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## Dan (May 16, 2013)

It's beautiful , great job


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## Zen (May 16, 2013)




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## mnpeep (May 16, 2013)




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## shovenose (May 16, 2013)

Don't make Stallion 2 publically available - you'll lose the edge and possible have security issues down the road. Now, a modified open-source version of Stallion 1 would be cool


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## Zen (May 16, 2013)

shovenose said:


> Don't make Stallion 2 publically available - you'll lose the edge and possible have security issues down the road. Now, a modified open-source version of Stallion 1 would be cool


Security through obscurity much?

They could perhaps license out S1 just like SolusVM.


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 16, 2013)

Zen said:


> They could perhaps license out S1 just like SolusVM.


 

Considered that as well... but then we'd be taking on a whole new fulltime job of having to do updates/etc -_-;


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## Francisco (May 16, 2013)

Zen said:


> Security through obscurity much?
> 
> They could perhaps license out S1 just like SolusVM.


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## SkylarM (May 16, 2013)

Looks incredible Francisco! Poked around for a while in it, very impressive.


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## Zen (May 17, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Encrypting the source is completely against the ideals we had for stallion and if we were to *ever* market it.
> 
> 
> I just don't know how I'd do it if we ever did.
> ...


Confusing scenario really. Though you've probably already thought of it, a licence checker type thing would easily name and shame the hosts using illegal copies and allow you to keep it unencrypted.

Furthermore, you could license it out without any guarantee of updates/fixes/etc. That way it doesn't become a full time job, and if licensed correctly the unencrypted nature of it would allow hosts that know what they are doing to change what needs to be changed and advance it even further.


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## Francisco (May 17, 2013)

Zen said:


> Confusing scenario really. Though you've probably already thought of it, a licence checker type thing would easily name and shame the hosts using illegal copies and allow you to keep it unencrypted.


No one would care alas.

If LET proved anything it's about what companies have some form of dignity.

Francisco


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## Coastercraze (May 17, 2013)




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## TommehM (May 17, 2013)

I love bootstrap <3


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## Tipsta (May 17, 2013)

Looking good!


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## ryanarp (May 17, 2013)

Looking forward to seeing this one day when I login to my control panel.


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## Nick_A (May 18, 2013)

So jelly.


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## Francisco (May 19, 2013)

I need some feedback from users & providers alike on KVM security:

[06:34] <~Delta> so vnc is insecure and i know some kvm users disable it once they're all done

[06:35] <~Delta> since the new remote console i'm adding is entirely HTML5/ajax, it means we could add an option

[06:35] <~Delta> 'only allow VNC from the control panel' or something like that

[06:35] <~Delta> since i could just have the node firewall the port to only allow manage's ip

[06:35] <~Delta> that'd give users some protection as well as access if they need it

[06:36] <~Delta> user<>manage is all https with websockets ssl too

[06:36] <~Delta> and the end user doesn't provide the password

[06:36] <~Delta> it's entirely token based

Honestly, the 'disable vnc entirely' option seems pointless on the basis that if someone can get into your user to toggle said control, you have much bigger problems anyways.

Encrypted FS doesn't make a difference either since users *need* to be able to type their details at POST time to get the FS to unlock.

All feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Francisco


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## acd (May 19, 2013)

Dearest Pony Lord;

As a paranoid KVM user and moderately long-term customer of yours, I'm one of those folks advocating turning off VNC after you're done with it and only turning it on as needed. As security conscious as your team seems to be, I'm sure you've got some monitoring in place to prevent brute force attempts on VNC ports, but still, they are vulnerable. It wouldn't be so bad if VNC didn't silently truncate your passwords to 8 characters, or send them with one of the weakest crypto schemes ever, as well as plaintext key events and absolute mouse posi.... you get the idea, it's an insecure pile of horse manure if you can get the right logging window in tcpdump.

That being said, my answer to your question is "It really depends". If you have a fantastic VNC/console implementation in HTML5/ajax, then for sure, this will help a lot. I will pretty much use the manage page exclusively and I'll set up the IP lock you'd implement. If it's crap, nobody is going to use it anyway, so it's not going to help a lick. I have a couple of concerns that this centralizes the point of failure to your Stallion2 server in both a security sense--comp'd stallion2 would mean free reign to everyone's goodies, a situation not much different than it is now; and a reliability sense--a failure of your LV or CN networks would make all KVMs unreachable via VNC console, as opposed to just LV on fail there, or nobody, if just CN dropped out. That being said, for most users the feature you propose would be be a fair step up in security in a way that is nearly transparent to users which is pretty much win/win.

If you're going to implement firewall IP locks for VNC however, I would really appreciate it if you implemented a full IP ACL solution, which is not too much further away, though I will be the first to admit the increase in complexity is not trivial. If I could lock to specific IPs, I'd be much more willing to leave VNC running, just in case. The way I handle security now is two faceted. First, at both of your locations I have a single VPN server on a 128 (used to be just ssh port forward, that works equally well) that I use to manage my machines at each site, still using external IPs since I don't know the VLAN IPs for the host nodes. Not that it matters, at that point the traffic is as secure as your LAN is, which is about the same as running VNC from Stallion2. Second, on any KVM which has data I think should be moderately secure, I'm running key-only ssh-unlocked FDE (not console unlockable). Debian 6 & 7 have made that setup extremely simple so there's no longer any reason not to and it's a lot easier to type my boot-server alias and type in the ssh key's passphrase than it is to vnc, etc. Foolproof, it is not, but it's the best I can do with the tools I've got. Having an encrypted FS is about making yourself a less easy target than your VM neighbor, hopefully giving me enough time to notice something is up.

tl;dr: You should do it, and it should default to "Locked to Stallion2". Please add VNC IP ACLs to your someday-TODO list as well.

best regards,
-tw


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## Francisco (May 19, 2013)

acd said:


> Dearest Pony Lord;
> 
> 
> As a paranoid KVM user and moderately long-term customer of yours, I'm one of those folks advocating turning off VNC after you're done with it and only turning it on as needed. As security conscious as your team seems to be, I'm sure you've got some monitoring in place to prevent brute force attempts on VNC ports, but still, they are vulnerable. It wouldn't be so bad if VNC didn't silently truncate your passwords to 8 characters, or send them with one of the weakest crypto schemes ever, as well as plaintext key events and absolute mouse posi.... you get the idea, it's an insecure pile of horse manure if you can get the right logging window in tcpdump.
> ...


Hm.

Adding ACL support wouldn't be very hard if I'm already doing the other controls. I could simply just give each VPS its own INPUT table in IPTABLES, default policy DENY then just add allowed ip's/networks.

 How does 10 ACL entries sound? It would support ip's as well as networks (ex. allow anything from 1.2.3.4/24).

Francisco


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## Kyle (May 19, 2013)

Wow it's amazing, it's one of the nicest panels I've seen! How long has it been in development? (Not sure if you said that in here already if you did sorry I must have read over it)


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## Francisco (May 19, 2013)

Kyle said:


> Wow it's amazing, it's one of the nicest panels I've seen! How long has it been in development? (Not sure if you said that in here already if you did sorry I must have read over it)


11/2 months.


Francisco


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## bfj (May 19, 2013)

I fail to see any cock or nut shots sir. 

You are a failure.


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## bzImage (May 19, 2013)

[18:39:09] <bzImage> Allow vnc to be disabled entirely, but actually tell the user that it's disabled when they try to go and use it. It's rare but a few clients ticket aboot it and go 'vnc isn't working.'
[18:39:18] <bzImage> on top of your idear.


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## Francisco (May 19, 2013)

bzImage said:


> [18:39:09] <bzImage> Allow vnc to be disabled entirely, but actually tell the user that it's disabled when they try to go and use it. It's rare but a few clients ticket aboot it and go 'vnc isn't working.'
> 
> 
> [18:39:18] <bzImage> on top of your idear.


Will do 


So far the 'whats left' list is shrinking quickly.


RDNS needs to push entries into powerdns

Re-Write powerdns interface into a codeigniter controller instead of a procedural page like it currently is

OpenVZ virtual server creation

- This is just for provisioning. We don't really need the option to manually create virtual servers in an initial release

Write a new WHMCS module that does basic controls. We don't need panel controls in WHMCS short of admin ones

Client side API controls. I'll need to introduce 'versions'.

- /v1/ will support all solusvm controls allowing users to continue using their current setup

- /v2/ will add support for pretty much everything the frontend can do for users.

Virtual server statistics. I'm still not sure how I want to store these.

remote console access for KVM & OpenVZ users. We could launch with java based clients but ehhhhhh


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## bzImage (May 19, 2013)

Francisco said:


> remote console access for KVM & OpenVZ users. We could launch with java based clients but ehhhhhh


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## Francisco (May 19, 2013)

bzImage said:


> Please no java. Clients shouldn't have to click "Yes" to 20 different prompts because java has a zero day exploit 3 times a week.


I'll be using novnc which is entirely javascript based (and if that doesn't work, it'll use flash).


I can actually reuse a lot of Nikki's code for it so I'll likely do that.

Francisco


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## acd (May 20, 2013)

Francisco said:


> How does 10 ACL entries sound? It would support ip's as well as networks (ex. allow anything from 1.2.3.4/24).


10 ACL entries is more than sufficient for my needs, more than twice sufficient actually. Thanks, boss.


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## Francisco (May 20, 2013)

acd said:


> 10 ACL entries is more than sufficient for my needs, more than twice sufficient actually. Thanks, boss.


sounds good sir  Thanks for the feedback.

Console accounts for a fairly large part of what's left.

Francisco


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## jhadley (May 20, 2013)

Fantastic work!


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## Francisco (May 20, 2013)

I've decided to change around some of the launch feature expectations.

http://wiki.buyvm.net/doku.php/stallion2?&#launch_features_still_required

As you can see the client side API has been postponed by launch + 1 week. The reason I'm doing this is that I'd rather get the whole ACL system integrated not only into VNC but OpenVZ as well. The amount of people that use the console *far* outweigh those that are using the client API.

Stats have also been postponed on the basis of "We haven't had working statistics for going on 2 years now, what's another week or two?" <_<

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 20, 2013)

I've done up the console settings section and would like some feedback.

http://209.141.39.7/vserver/1/console

Please let me know 


Francisco


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## mojeda (May 20, 2013)

Francisco said:


> I've done up the console settings section and would like some feedback.
> 
> http://209.141.39.7/vserver/1/console
> 
> ...


Maybe just me but the border radius for the Console Settings and Access Control List navigation doesn't match with the buttons and bugs me slightly... It has a border radius of 2px vs I think 4px.

The parent UL tag also has .nav-pills and .nav-tabs it only needs .nav-pills, unless some other reason?

Other than that it looks good.


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## Francisco (May 20, 2013)

I'll fiddle with it in a bit 

I'm just commiting the ACL code right now so we'll see how that works.

Once It's working you can test it using the VNC details listed.

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 21, 2013)

Oki doki for those interested!

You're now able to control the ACL on http://209.141.39.7/vserver/5/console

You're able to also start/stop/restart and set the VNC password and see it load up.

'Launch Console' isn't working yet as I haven't built that page yet. The page will be a popup so you aren't limited to what tab you're on.

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 21, 2013)

And another update for fun.

ACL support has been integrated into the OpenVZ shell.

You're welcome to fiddle with the controls on http://209.141.39.7/vserver/1/console

You can then ssh in with:

host: buster.buyvm.net

username: console-1

password: test

I still need to code serial console password changing so don't bother wacking at that.

For those that want a TL;DR:



Francisco


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## vRozenSch00n (May 21, 2013)

Nice feature @Francisco


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## Epidrive (May 21, 2013)

Titty sprinkles. Lol


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## Francisco (May 22, 2013)

Tonights project was getting the console popup working since I wanted something fun.



Lets be honest, you wish your console looked that good :3

Entirely HTML5/flash based. There's no heavy ass java plugin.

Francisco


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 22, 2013)

Francisco said:


> There's no heavy ass java plugin.


 

I cannot hit the Thanks button enough for this  <_<  Removing Java is going to make my work a good deal easier (especially considering how often I work purely from console and buffers).


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## George_Fusioned (May 22, 2013)

<3


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## Tux (May 22, 2013)

I'd like it if all VPS control panels had 2-step auth (preferably email or mobile device via Google Authenticator and similar apps).

Adding that would be the *tits*.


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## Francisco (May 22, 2013)

Tux said:


> I'd like it if all VPS control panels had 2-step auth (preferably email or mobile device via Google Authenticator and similar apps).
> 
> Adding that would be the *tits*.


Could you check our bug reports and see if google auth is listed? If not, mind adding it as a feature request? I'll add it post production.

Francisco


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## Tux (May 22, 2013)

I don't see where to file a bug. :$


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## Francisco (May 22, 2013)

Check the footer.

"File a franning" :3

Francisco


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## Tux (May 22, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Check the footer.
> 
> 
> "File a franning" :3
> ...


Had to login  I've filed it now.


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## Francisco (May 22, 2013)

I've got things generalized & merged to support openvz now 

The console is shared for both platforms. All HTML5 and simply sexy as hell.



Next up, getting the console *users* working for openvz. I think that's the last thing needed for console.

Francisco


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## Shados (May 22, 2013)

>cat nipples

I feel like I should thank you for that post, but I'm really not sure why.


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## bzImage (May 22, 2013)

This panel makes my nippies hard.


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## Francisco (May 23, 2013)

Remote console via SSH is now fully supported.

You're welcome to set a password (within the listed guidelines) and then you can ssh into the details mentioned.

ACL is in full play as well so give that a whirl if you have time.

Francisco


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## rsk (May 23, 2013)

Really good work Fran


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## Francisco (May 23, 2013)

rsk said:


> Really good work Fran


Thanks boss 

I'm not sure what i'm going to work on next. Probably fine tune a few pages that need it and go over the bug reports I got.

Francisco


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## mikho (May 23, 2013)

Haven't really followed the updates since I'm no longer an active customer...

one thing that struck me today is; Will you have API enabled for Stallion, like Solus have, to ask for mem usage, bandwidth etc ...

Reason is that I have SolusVMController installed and added my servers there in a feeble try to keep updated on their status.

Will I be able to add a future VPS from buyvm there and get information about the VPS?


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## mojeda (May 23, 2013)

mikho said:


> Haven't really followed the updates since I'm no longer an active customer...
> 
> one thing that struck me today is; Will you have API enabled for Stallion, like Solus have, to ask for mem usage, bandwidth etc ...
> 
> ...


It should still support solusvm-like api with v1 of the stallion api however there will be a new one (v2) that will offer more stuff, I believe.


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## mikho (May 23, 2013)

Cool, thanks!


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## Francisco (May 23, 2013)

mikho said:


> Haven't really followed the updates since I'm no longer an active customer...
> 
> one thing that struck me today is; Will you have API enabled for Stallion, like Solus have, to ask for mem usage, bandwidth etc ...
> 
> ...





mojeda said:


> It should still support solusvm-like api with v1 of the stallion api however there will be a new one (v2) that will offer more stuff, I believe.


Bingo  We'll have a 'solusvm' proxy in place so users that want to hook it into solusvmcontroller/etc can without issue.

We'll also have a much bigger API that should allow most controls w/o issue.

Francisco


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## mikho (May 23, 2013)

I just remembered that I did use the solus api when I was a customer, facepalm and time-out in the corner.


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## rsk (May 23, 2013)

Oops @Fran .. I messed up your smexy console. 

http://209.141.39.7/vserver/5/console

Cant get it to reboot  stuck at booting from hd.


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## Francisco (May 23, 2013)

rsk said:


> Oops @Fran .. I messed up your smexy console.
> 
> http://209.141.39.7/vserver/5/console
> 
> Cant get it to reboot  stuck at booting from hd.


Change the boot order & mount a CD? 

It's marked as 'boot HD 1st, CDROM 2nd' and no CD in there.

Francisco


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## mojeda (May 23, 2013)

Are none of the servers supposed to boot? I can't remember if they were just placements or were actually tied to a machine.

I tried to boot Fishfingers and heil pony but they would fail.


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## Francisco (May 23, 2013)

mojeda said:


> Are none of the servers supposed to boot? I can't remember if they were just placements or were actually tied to a machine.
> 
> I tried to boot Fishfingers and heil pony but they would fail.


http://199.19.227.70/vserver/1

http://199.19.227.70/vserver/5

Are both real VM's you can fiddle with. I'm currently redoing how reboots/shutdowns are handled on KVM so it might not do anything.

Francisco


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## shunny (May 24, 2013)

Woa! This is rather neat! Awesome job pony! Been with you for a while and was waiting for something like this!


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## Francisco (May 24, 2013)

shunny said:


> Woa! This is rather neat! Awesome job pony! Been with you for a while and was waiting for something like this!


Thanks 

I think it's getting pretty awesome.

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 25, 2013)

Pretty happy to be able to write this.

As of today I'll have the basis of our DNS platform all in place with RDNS controls hooked up (the rest of the DNS controls will come at a later date). What this means for the project is starting Monday we'll be in release-candidate mode.

I've asked a few of the bug testers we've had if they could do another, complete, audit of the project so we can find all outstanding bugs for me to fix.

Assuming the bug list is quite small we'll write our importers and look at an early/mid June roll out 





Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (May 25, 2013)

Just sayin' Francisco, if you need another tester, I'm here! And you can ask anyone: I'm thorough.


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## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Just sayin' Francisco, if you need another tester, I'm here! And you can ask anyone: I'm thorough.


You're welcome to already start on it 

RDNS controls have been completed and committed. While powerdns isn't running on the test server, I at least have the database in place and the data inserted is correct.

I spent a little extra time on it making the class already support our future hosted DNS services. I just need to add support for for TXT/SRV types, other than that A/AAAA/CNAME/PTR/NS are all there.

Monday we'll finish the WHMCS module & integration. Anyone that's really wanting to help bug test, please go ahead and do so and report back any quirks or things you think we should improve before the initial release.

Francisco


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## RootNerds (May 26, 2013)

The look and feel of that control panel is really nice. And I just heard WHMCS module which makes this even more interesting. Do you know anything about pricing yet? Will it be similar to SolusVMs?


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## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

RootNerds said:


> The look and feel of that control panel is really nice. And I just heard WHMCS module which makes this even more interesting. Do you know anything about pricing yet? Will it be similar to SolusVMs?


This is a private panel that isn't going up for sale, sorry!

People were really curious with how development had been going so I decided to make a thread originally on lowendtalk and now here. This is the only thread I'm keeping up to date.

The WHMCS module is only a stop-gap while we code our new billing panel 

Francisco


----------



## RootNerds (May 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> This is a private panel that isn't going up for sale, sorry!
> 
> 
> People were really curious with how development had been going so I decided to make a thread originally on lowendtalk and now here. This is the only thread I'm keeping up to date.
> ...


Damn  Jelly now  Looks really good.


----------



## VPSDATABASE (May 26, 2013)

I can't wait!

Good thing SolusVM wasn't for you!

Building your own vps control panel did have a huge impact!

Loving it so far.


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

I need feedback on how people want statistic controls to work, namely when picking a different range.

Right now i'm thinking we have 3 fields:

- Date (would be a date picker kind of deal)

- Start time

- End time

It would then load up the graphs available for your VM.

Statistics would be kept as every 5 minutes and given the setup we have planned I have no reason to be shedding any of the records. What this means is that if you want to see a certain hour from 9 months ago (assuming there is 9 months of data) you can do that.

I'd allow a max of 50 - 100 points be shown on a graph. This will allow them to look quite smooth without it slamming the crap out of RAM to generate.

Francisco


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## MrOwen (May 26, 2013)

A date/time picker a la Google Calendar would be a pretty good implentation on picking the dates. I've used some dude's jQuery timepicker plugin before (https://github.com/jonthornton/jquery-timepicker) and it's pretty much an exact replica of Calendar's picker. I imagine you could do something like default to 24 hour period after they pick the start date/time (and even default to 12:00am right after they pick a date).


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

MrOwen said:


> A date/time picker a la Google Calendar would be a pretty good implentation on picking the dates. I've used some dude's jQuery timepicker plugin before (https://github.com/jonthornton/jquery-timepicker) and it's pretty much an exact replica of Calendar's picker. I imagine you could do something like default to 24 hour period after they pick the start date/time (and even default to 12:00am right after they pick a date).


Do you think that's enough granularity then? I was thinking of maybe one of those 'select the period of time you want' where you drag and select but I didn't like how they felt nor did they suit the project.

That's a pretty nice picker, though  Thanks for the recommendation!

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

Yacking to a few people on IRC seems to bring up the idea/point that we should have a start/stop range that also includes a date. It makes sense and should be no additional effort to do 

Francisco


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## Marc M. (May 26, 2013)

@Francisco - Looks really good. I would license it for sure if you would be willing to .... license us a copy


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (May 26, 2013)

marcm said:


> @Francisco - Looks really good. I would license it for sure if you would be willing to .... license us a copy


That would be rather counter-productive of why we're redoing Stallion to begin with  B)


----------



## D. Strout (May 26, 2013)




----------



## Marc M. (May 26, 2013)




----------



## Aldryic C'boas (May 26, 2013)

marcm said:


> *@[member='Aldryic C'bo*


----------



## MrOwen (May 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Do you think that's enough granularity then? I was thinking of maybe one of those 'select the period of time you want' where you drag and select but I didn't like how they felt nor did they suit the project.






Francisco said:


> Yacking to a few people on IRC seems to bring up the idea/point that we should have a start/stop range that also includes a date. It makes sense and should be no additional effort to do


If you were going with that plugin, they have an example of a range picker which also indicates duration while picking the second time. Unfortunately, it looks like picking a different day disables showing a duration 

But I can imagine 15 min steps in the picker (or even half hour, unless you think there are people who would bitch about something like that) would be sufficient. Plus, I'm sure a lot of people use Google Calendar already and are used to that style picker.


----------



## Marc M. (May 26, 2013)




----------



## Aldryic C'boas (May 26, 2013)

marcm said:


> especially since I haven't addressed any questions or concerns to you.





marcm said:


> @Aldryic C'bo


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

marcm said:


> @Francisco about Stalion2,


He's correct.

Everything we go into as a company has to have everyone onboard for it or we don't bother.

When we got rid of our last 2 developers on stallion we vote that consisted of the following options:

- opensource all of stallion 2, get people involved in development

- hire an outside development team to handle it instead of individuals

- scrap the idea for the panel entirely and just fix up stallion 1

- I become the main developer and Aldryic/Anthony picked up all of ticket slack that they can

We bat around all the options and even did interviews with some development teams but in the end we simply

held back some of our projects and i've been doing the code myself.

Yes, I could make a *lot* of money off the panel. Everyone, including Solus, knows that if Stallion came around

with the features that are planned and I offered a conversion script? They'd be under the gun. The panel, though,

is developed with BuyVM in mind. It's developed with a mindset of how we build our locations amongst other things.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

I should also add:

I'd like to help out a few companies that I really like with a license to the source, but the problem is I have no guarantee that they won't sellout and include the license in the sale. There's more than a few asshat providers that would love

to get away from solus and have already tried to buy Stallion 1's source once.

Francisco


----------



## Gallaeaho (May 26, 2013)

I took a quick look through your demo and I must say that I'm very excited to see the completed version, Fransisco. Even as it is right now, it is very intuitive and user friendly. I am patiently awaiting your completed version.


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

Gallaeaho said:


> I took a quick look through your demo and I must say that I'm very excited to see the completed version, Fransisco. Even as it is right now, it is very intuitive and user friendly. I am patiently awaiting your completed version.


As of right now it's what the final build will look like.

@mojeda was kind enough to actually build a new front login that's mobile friendly while still keeping the feel of it. I'll likely expand on what they made and push it out this week 

Francisco


----------



## Gallaeaho (May 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> As of right now it's what the final build will look like.
> 
> 
> @mojeda was kind enough to actually build a new front login that's mobile friendly while still keeping the feel of it. I'll likely expand on what they made and push it out this week
> ...


I'm okay with this. Stallion looks quite awesome in its current state. There are still improvements to be made to it though, I reckon?


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

Gallaeaho said:


> I'm okay with this. Stallion looks quite awesome in its current state. There are still improvements to be made to it though, I reckon?


Here's what I wrote on LET about it all.



> Hello everyone,
> 
> TL;DR - a long read but a good look into what's on the menu
> 
> ...


So yes, lots of fun features on the way post launch


----------



## Marc M. (May 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Everything we go into as a company has to have everyone onboard for it or we don't bother....


*@**Francisco* I didn't want to quote your entire post. Thank you for the detailed explanation. As usual, it was very elegant and properly worded. *@[member='Aldryic C'bo*


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

marcm said:


> *@Francisco* I didn't want to quote your entire post. Thank you for the detailed explanation. As usual, it was very elegant and properly worded. *@[member="Aldryic C" bo*


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## Francisco (May 26, 2013)

The idea of licensing is still on the table but not for anything wide spread. It'd be I literally pick a half dozen or less providers that I really want to see take off and I license them it. I wouldn't bother going widespread.

'Cubing the source is against what we always wanted for stallion if we ever marketed it but who knows, we'll see what happens 

Francisco


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (May 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> 'Cubing the source is against what we always wanted for stallion if we ever marketed it but who knows, we'll see what happens


We could always do it in perl :3

The problem with licensing is either having to encode the source (and then provide updates/etc to multiple people, something I really wouldn't want us to spend the time doing) or hope that it doesn't end up on pastebin/etc the day after.  You're far more trusting than I sir... some of the folks I've seen express interest - not a chance.


----------



## Francisco (May 26, 2013)




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## VPN.SH (May 26, 2013)

Really like what you guys have done with Stallion . Nice to see a provider really taking a stance and pushing their own panel!


----------



## mojeda (May 28, 2013)

I'm interested in Stallion 1 for personal/limited use if that is ever released


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## Francisco (May 28, 2013)

mojeda said:


> I'm interested in Stallion 1 for personal/limited use if that is ever released


Yes lots of people would 

Stallion 1 is embarrasing in many parts so I wouldn't bother releasing it. A hunk of the backend is broken since we didn't need those pages. Frontend is really simple and the communication code is pretty straight forward at least.

Right now i'm currently waiting on Aldryic to finish documenting the API that he needs for WHMCS. He's been caught up dealing with his car though 

I'm taking some time to start work on statistics. I think I'm going to just yoink rackspace's granularity settings for our own: http://docs.rackspace.com/cm/api/v1.0/cm-devguide/content/metrics-api.html

I'll remove the 'full' since I don't want to be taking stats points every minute. I originally was looking at xchart to handle the graphing but given how many data points we'll be showing I don't think it's a going to handle very well. Right now i'm looking over flot and seeing what it can do.

Francisco


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## acd (May 28, 2013)

Hi Fran,

I think 5 minutes for the first 48 hours, 15 min - 1 h granularity after that is appropriate, if it isn't too taxing on data storage (I suspect it won't be). More than that probably exceeds usefulness; anyone who needs more granularity is going to run their own stats anyway.

-tw


----------



## Francisco (May 28, 2013)

acd said:


> Hi Fran,
> 
> I think 5 minutes for the first 48 hours, 15 min - 1 h granularity after that is appropriate, if it isn't too taxing on data storage (I suspect it won't be). More than that probably exceeds usefulness; anyone who needs more granularity is going to run their own stats anyway.
> 
> -tw


Yea i'm starting to think the same.

I'm going to crunch some numbers and see what I can come up with that's reasonable 

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

Been wacking away at bug reports that have been coming in.

So far I've found us a new horse head for our logo since I didn't have a vector for the last one.

http://199.19.227.70/login.html

That page doesn't submit or anything but it'll at least render properly on browsers & cellphones/tablets.

I also put together a quick 'information' page for ip addresses:

http://199.195.255.70/vserver/5/ipaddresses/

Francisco


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## WebSearchingPro (May 29, 2013)

Was the last horse head the same as your forum picture?

Edit: Old: http://209.141.39.7/ - New: http://199.19.227.70/login.html

I kind of  really like the new one, it has more of a sharper look to it really making it match the font that sits beside it 

Just feels.. more professional.

It may be my colorblindness, but is the div class="login" green tinted?

Hmm #FAFAFA seems close without that tint, if thats not what you were going for.


----------



## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

WebSearchingPro said:


> Was the last horse head the same as your forum picture?
> 
> Edit: Old: http://209.141.39.7/ - New: http://199.19.227.70/login.html
> 
> ...


Correct, the original horse is the one in my avatar  I'll have to fix it 

I'll check the colouring to make sure it all matches. It'll be pretty embarrasing if I somehow screwed that up >_>

Francisco


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## netnub (May 29, 2013)

fran:


if you ever release stallion 1 encoded in ioncube or any encoders, I say this nicely but I'll decode it.


IONCUBE sucks, its super easy to decode, if you do though, encrypt the functions/variables using ioncube settings, then its hard as hell to decode.


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## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

netnub said:


> fran:
> 
> if you ever release stallion 1 encoded in ioncube or any encoders, I say this nicely but I'll decode it.
> 
> IONCUBE sucks, its super easy to decode, if you do though, encrypt the functions/variables using ioncube settings, then its hard as hell to decode.


And that's why I'd have to do it as a 'source or bust' idea.

Francisco


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## D. Strout (May 29, 2013)

FYI, the demo login page doesn't appear correctly on the Kindle Fire (non-hd). The logo is under the username and password boxes.


----------



## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> FYI, the demo login page doesn't appear correctly on the Kindle Fire (non-hd). The logo is under the username and password boxes.


How the hell.

That doesn't even make sense!

Is it poorly placed there? Or is it spaced properly? I'm wondering if it's a float issue.

Francisco


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## D. Strout (May 29, 2013)

Hang on, I'll see if I can get a screenshot. I'll also try landscape and portrait.



Francisco said:


> That doesn't even make sense!


If I had a dollar for every time I yelled that at my computer screen...


----------



## D. Strout (May 29, 2013)

Did you change something during this time? It works fine now. I was positive it wasn't working earlier...

Oh well, either way, it works now. Nevermind  :wacko:


----------



## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Hang on, I'll see if I can get a screenshot. I'll also try landscape and portrait.
> 
> If I had a dollar for every time I yelled that at my computer screen...


I stripped some margin code out that wasn't needed.

Maybe that did it?

I'm merging the code right now 

Francisco


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## Francisco (May 29, 2013)

All merged.

I think it looks pretty good!

Francisco


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## netnub (May 31, 2013)

Francisco said:


> All merged.
> 
> 
> I think it looks pretty good!
> ...


much better...

http://prntscr.com/17jqmm


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## Zen (May 31, 2013)

Going to have a read through the last couple pages, hope it's going well.


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## shovenose (May 31, 2013)

looks perfect on my Android phone. I am jealous


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## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

Any time you care to drop a release date... I'll be anxiously refreshing my Stallion on said day


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## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

netnub said:


> much better...
> 
> http://prntscr.com/17jqmm


Yep. I took some ideas from the original one to build the new one. The new one uses bootstraps

framework though so it collapses properly on low resolution devices.



Zen said:


> Going to have a read through the last couple pages, hope it's going well.


 Welcome to the forums and let me know if you catch any glaring bugs/interface suggestions.



shovenose said:


> looks perfect on my Android phone. I am jealous


 That was my focus yesterday. The virtual server overview page got a fairly big overhaul so

it properly collapses on other resolutions. It took a bit of getting used to since I removed

one of the columns.



D. Strout said:


> Any time you care to drop a release date... I'll be anxiously refreshing my Stallion on said day


Nothing concrete yet but I think Aldryic is pretty close to getting the WHMCS module completed.

Francisco


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## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

Francisco said:


> I think Aldryic is pretty close to getting the WHMCS module completed.


 

I can't wait till the day that billing is integrated - that'll be even better


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## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> I can't wait till the day that billing is integrated - that'll be even better


For sure 

We'll likely automate 99% of the options too.

Users will put credit on their account and then there will be a billing tab on each virtual server

where they can buy space/ip's/filtered ip's, change plans, or cancel.

If a users account is in fully approved status the upgrades/etc will be automatically approved and assigned.

New VM's ordered will be the same.

Francisco


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## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

/me drools

What about IPv6? I thought you might have mentioned giving each user a /64, then enabling individual address allocation automatically through the CP. Or was that just my imagination? I would think there might be some trouble with that on non-OpenVZ, though...


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> /me drools
> 
> What about IPv6? I thought you might have mentioned giving each user a /64, then enabling individual address allocation automatically through the CP. Or was that just my imagination? I would think there might be some trouble with that on non-OpenVZ, though...


This is one of those 'early after launch' features that we have planned  To make our lives easier we'll likely do something where when the user requests a /64, it'll be an all or nothing kind of deal. You'd have to return the ip's we randomly assign out and you'd assign yourself out of your /64.

We'll have to setup a 2nd router in each location that handles just IPV6 end points but I can use vyatta, etc for that. I really don't want to be binding thousands of subnets on our core router or anything 

Francisco


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## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

Sounds like a good deal to me. You say "request" -  that sounds manual, is it? Either way, I assume the user will have to manually run ip -6 addr add etc. to get those in. Sounds fair.


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Sounds like a good deal to me. You say "request" -  that sounds manual, is it? Either way, I assume the user will have to manually run ip -6 addr add etc. to get those in. Sounds fair.


Nope.

It'll be automated. I'll likely add it on the dashboard where it'll list your subnet for each location. If you don't have a sub? You can 'provision' one and it'll do so. If you do have one, it'll link to another page where you can manage the subnet (mass add ip's, pick specific ones (dead.beef 4 lyfe), assign ip's to certain vm's, etc).

I was thinking about trying to add the add controls onto vserver/*/ipaddresses page but I feel it's going to become very crowded and hard to use.

Input?

Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

I don't think it would be too crowded. As I see it, under [...]/ipaddresses, you have the IPv4 "tab", then if a person has a /64 (or two) the IPv6 tab instead of just a number says "/64 x 2" (or whatever) and instead of showing the interface for individual addresses it shows an interface set up for managing the /64. For that I'd like to suggest a "random address" button, which will generate a random address in the /64 to be assigned to the VM.

Also, just a little thing, but IMHO you should show the abbreviated version of IPv6 addresses.


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> I don't think it would be too crowded. As I see it, under [...]/ipaddresses, you have the IPv4 "tab", then if a person has a /64 (or two) the IPv6 tab instead of just a number says "/64 x 2" (or whatever) and instead of showing the interface for individual addresses it shows an interface set up for managing the /64. For that I'd like to suggest a "random address" button, which will generate a random address in the /64 to be assigned to the VM.
> 
> Also, just a little thing, but IMHO you should show the abbreviated version of IPv6 addresses.


For a single virtual server it'd show the /64 for the region that VPS is bound to. Remember, users can't have more than a single /64 per region (for now).

I could likely just add a modal to handle 'specific ip address'. I'll see about making it display the compressed IPV6  Could you add that as a bug to the panel?

Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

Francisco said:


> For a single virtual server it'd show the /64 for the region that VPS is bound to. Remember, users can't have more than a single /64 per region (for now).
> 
> 
> I could likely just add a modal to handle 'specific ip address'. I'll see about making it display the compressed IPV6  Could you add that as a bug to the panel?
> ...


Whatever way you do it I'm sure it will be brilliant  I've added the IPv6 address display bug.


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Whatever way you do it I'm sure it will be brilliant  I've added the IPv6 address display bug.


Right now i'm going over things on IRC on how to make the interface easier on mobile devices.

We're thinking that the tabs for the sections of /vserver/ should disappear when you're on a mobile device

and instead we should add a dropdown nav in the top nav. We'd rename 'virtual servers' to 'dashboard' or something then have like 'hostname' -> (bunch of menu options).

My biggest issue with the current tabs is they can be hard to click since they wrap on themselves.

I could probably code something to make them compact into a select box and not shove it in the header? That might be nicer.

Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (May 31, 2013)

Well, now you're outside my area of interest. I don't have a really "mobile" device. Even the Kindle Fire I was using earlier was borrowed. My philosophy is that if you're going to be managing your servers, you should do it from a platform where you can see what you're doing 

Still, your idea does seem to be slick, collapsing like that. I'm all for it.


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

Fair enough 

We got lots of features on the way. The biggest commits will be:

- floating IP's on both platforms

- user IPV6 subnets

- BuyVM+ merger


----------



## netnub (May 31, 2013)

Can you add floating ipv4's? So you can transfer ipv4's across machines.


----------



## acd (May 31, 2013)

Francisco said:


> ...floating IP's on both platforms...





netnub said:


> Can you add floating ipv4's...


<.<

>.>

*flees*


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

netnub said:


> Can you add floating ipv4's? So you can transfer ipv4's across machines.


Floating IP's isn't quite that...yet 

Right now IP's are hard bound to a virtual server. The idea behind floating IP's is that an IP can be bound to multiple VM's w/o issue for the sake of high availability.

Once billing merges we'll likely allow 'moving' of IP's between servers. That's entirely up to Aldryic though.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

I think if we wanted to allow IP moving we'd need to move to 'pooled bandwidth' between all virtual servers.

So, you buy 5 VPS servers with 500GB each. Your 'pool' would be 2.5TB that can be shared any which way.

By default a vm would come with a user settable "hard cap" of whatever the plan came with. If they want

to make use of the pooling they can simply disable that and bandwidth is used up as needed.

We'd need to likely introduce 2 pools for users. 'Monthly recurring' & 'additional one off usage'. The monthly

pool would reset based on their plans and the one-time stuff would be 'I bought 1TB of additional transit since I need it'.

You'd be able to buy bandwidth against an account or against a virtual server. Against the vserver it would

become part of the accounts recurring transit where as 'buying it against the account' goes to the one-off.

I think I might be confusing people though <_<

Francisco


----------



## netnub (May 31, 2013)

Why not re-write it so that each IP has its own bandwidth that is logged?


----------



## Francisco (May 31, 2013)

That already happens and is displayed on the ipaddresses page 

http://199.19.227.70/vserver/1/ipaddresses

I think I got the inbound/outbound in reverse though <_<

Woops >_>

Francisco


----------



## acd (Jun 1, 2013)

If you start tracking bandwidth usage by account, that's going to start looking really weird and make accounting a bit odd. There was some weirdness on one of my VMs at LV last month that I wouldn't have noticed excepting that it was on a nearly unused kvm. Tracking only aggregate account bandwidth would have hidden that from me. Second, anyone who is managing VMs for other users most likely doesn't want to be co-opted into a single, per-account pool, running the risk that a single user could result in a freeze of every VM across their account. Granted, this scenario would require bad/no traffic accounting configuration on their part or a single-VM exploit, but it's possible (and as probable as an insecure Wordpress plugin) and it's something which would worry me in that position.

I'm not in a position to say for sure, but I'm pretty confident your traffic accounting could be modified with relative ease to support floating IPs/moving them from instance-to-instance at the same site, though you may want a dedicated router for this kind of IP to keep the main one from getting an aneurysm *cough*. The easiest way to do this that comes to mind is NAT + track bw by an internal IP; not the CG-bind-everyone-to-one-ip NAT, but the intelligent loadbalancer/failover kind of NAT.

Aldryic will probably curse me for suggesting this, but if you did want to move to pooled bandwidth, may I suggest instead that you initially provision one pool per VM, and thereafter allow free merging and splitting of the pool; not necessarily by quantity, but by VM (this limits the amount of tomfoolery going on). Let me illustrate what I mean in narrative:



Story Time With TW said:


> Mr. Admin The Third, hereafter Matt, purchases an annual ovz128 with 500GB/mo of transfer for his pony trading service, of which he uses 600GB (having to add an extra 1TB/mo) before, a week later, he decides 128MB is just too small for his application (not to mention he's quickly using all of his bandwidth). Matt decides to purchase a kvm512 with 2TB/mo of transfer which comes in a separate pool dedicated to that VM. Given the option, he decides to merge the two pools this month, for a total of 3.5TB/mo, of which he has already used 600GB.
> 
> Pony trading is wildly popular and he ends up using 3TB of aggregate bandwidth that month, before Matt decides spin off the ovz128 for a pet project, finding the kvm512 up to the task of running his flesh trade site. When splitting the ovz128 out of the pool, it takes its portion of the pool with it, 500GB/mo plus its portion of the addon bandwidth. Since there is only 500GB left and the ovz128 contributed 20% of the base pool, when it is removed, it takes 20% of the remaining bandwidth with it (100GB). The kvm512 keeps the other 400GB remaining. That's ok though, since tomorrow is the 1st and bandwidth resets for both.
> 
> Since the bandwidth is an addon to the pool, it sticks with the kvm512 since the ovz128 was split off. Matt eventually cancels the ovz128, receiving an account credit for the remainder of the 15 USD he paid for the VM. The addon bandwidth stuck with the kvm512 and is not refunded or cancelled.


If that is unclear, it's because I've had too much caffeine for 3:30am.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 1, 2013)

I think pooled bandwidth is just too touchy of a subject to work on right now.

We have a grocery list of features to be completed way before merged bandwidth  To be honest, the merging is entirely on us just trying to give clients more options. It isn't a requested feature nor something that 'has' to be there.

I think the only feature some users would really like is being able to buy one-off bandwidth addons for a VM so they don't 'have' to buy a monthly addon if they only get heavy once in a blue moon.

Who knows. We have a ton of other things to get done before we start dreaming in the clouds.

Francisco


----------



## acd (Jun 1, 2013)

For the record, I am *not* asking for pooled bandwidth. I am asking for a way to avoid it personally.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 1, 2013)

acd said:


> For the record, I am *not* asking for pooled bandwidth. I am asking for a way to avoid it personally.


Yes I get that 

Francisco


----------



## LusoVPS (Jun 2, 2013)

Francisco, have you already decided if you're going to sell this?


----------



## Francisco (Jun 2, 2013)

LusoVPS said:


> Francisco, have you already decided if you're going to sell this?


Stallion 2 isn't for sale. I might license out a couple copies, though.

Francisco


----------



## LusoVPS (Jun 2, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Stallion 2 isn't for sale. I might license out a couple copies, though.
> 
> 
> Francisco


Ok then. I'll wait for any further development on this.

Congrats!


----------



## Francisco (Jun 2, 2013)

LusoVPS said:


> Ok then. I'll wait for any further development on this.
> 
> Congrats!


I'm not going to just hold a hat draw for who we'd license to. The licensing would include the source and given how quickly some brands are to sell, I wouldn't want my hard work suddenly getting included in the sale of any brand.

Francisco


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 2, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Stallion 2 isn't for sale. I might license out a couple copies, though.
> 
> Francisco


Sir, just so you know, I am addicted to ponies. I love unicorn, I eat corn for breakfast and my bed looks like a stallion.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 2, 2013)

SeriesN said:


> Sir, just so you know, I am addicted to ponies. I love unicorn, I eat corn for breakfast and my bed looks like a stallion.


Bahahahaha.

On another note, Aldryic has forwarded me the WHMCS module so i'll be integrating that on Monday/Tuesday. It shouldn't take me more than a few hours.

Francisco


----------



## bzImage (Jun 2, 2013)

Fran stopped playing swtor with me so he could have an affair with stallion 2. I am filing for a divorce.


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 2, 2013)

Double post fail!


----------



## Francisco (Jun 2, 2013)

bzImage said:


> Fran stopped playing swtor with me so he could have an affair with stallion 2. I am filing for a divorce.


I'm not giving you half my nodes you gold digging whore.

Francisco


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 2, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Bahahahaha.
> 
> On another note, Aldryic has forwarded me the WHMCS module so i'll be integrating that on Monday/Tuesday. It shouldn't take me more than a few hours.
> 
> Francisco


I will take my pants off and willing to share my bed with you.



bzImage said:


> Fran stopped playing swtor with me so he could have an affair with stallion 2. I am filing for a divorce.


Over my dead body!


----------



## bzImage (Jun 2, 2013)

Why not? Tipper shares custody of the internets with Al Gore.


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jun 2, 2013)

Why do I always get stuck with the camera  <_<


----------



## Francisco (Jun 7, 2013)

Hi Everyone,

Been a while since I've updated this but here goes.

Our WHMCS module & API is almost 90 - 95% complete with only a few last hooks needed. We fully expect to have 10 - 15 VM's available this weekend though WHMCS that will have a coupon to make them free. The VM's will provision to stallion 2 where you'll be expected to give things a full run through.

The node side will be running 2.6.32 and I'll import all of our current media into the system.

No promises but I'll see about letting people that actually help test (and find bugs) can keep their VM's for free (for at least a year or something).

Francisco


----------



## johnlth93 (Jun 7, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Hi Everyone,
> 
> 
> Been a while since I've updated this but here goes.
> ...


Came here for free VM  ^_^

just kidding ~ good job on Stallion 2 though


----------



## Hitakashi (Jun 7, 2013)

How much of the panel is mobile ready?

Also looks amazing...need to test it on a computer <. <


----------



## netnub (Jun 7, 2013)

Very nice but the login panel is pretty bad on mobile.


----------



## SkylarM (Jun 7, 2013)

I came here for the free vm.. I mean the candy.

In all seriousness though, lookin really good!


----------



## mojeda (Jun 7, 2013)

netnub said:


> Very nice but the login panel is pretty bad on mobile.


How so? Works fine for me.


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 7, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Hi Everyone,
> 
> 
> Been a while since I've updated this but here goes.
> ...


DoesBuyVMnoHazStock!


----------



## acd (Jun 7, 2013)

netnub said:


> Very nice but the login panel is pretty bad on mobile.




Seems ok to me. (android 2.3.4, CM7)


----------



## Francisco (Jun 7, 2013)

Yea the login page is something I spent quite a bit of time trying to make work on mobile.

Most of the panel is pretty mobile friendly. There's some large data tables though that don't look all that great.

http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/

I'm thinking the "No More Tables" example may work perfectly for this all?

Francisco


----------



## Hitakashi (Jun 8, 2013)

The only problem (I get) on the login page is that the incorrect login is cut off, other then that its perfect. (Galaxy S3 stock browser)


@Fran, As long as its not the flip scroll...I hate doing that ona mobile :/


----------



## Francisco (Jun 12, 2013)

Hitakashi said:


> The only problem (I get) on the login page is that the incorrect login is cut off, other then that its perfect. (Galaxy S3 stock browser)
> 
> @Fran, As long as its not the flip scroll...I hate doing that ona mobile :/


Noted that bug, i'll fix it today 

The past week or two has been about adding polish. We decided to clean up how information tables are presented, like so:

http://199.19.227.70/vserver/1/console

You can see that the 'frames' are now an off white and have a proper header now. I think it blends with the rest of the site quite well. I still need to normalize the alerts that are displayed to the user since I forgot to include them in a few of the pages. Never fear, it's a pretty minor bug.

For users with admin, you can check out http://199.19.227.70/admin/users/view/1003

It's fairly well detailed. I'm going to add a bit more to it, though. I need to include some 'quick jump' controls for editing/deleting/etc.

You can also test out the admin side top search to see that it actually works now 

Honestly, we have 1 - 2 more pages needed and then I need to write the import scripts for stallion 1 -> 2.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jun 12, 2013)

Hitakashi said:


> The only problem (I get) on the login page is that the incorrect login is cut off, other then that its perfect. (Galaxy S3 stock browser)
> 
> @Fran, As long as its not the flip scroll...I hate doing that ona mobile :/


The login page is all fixed up  Some very simple CSS was needed.


```
@media only screen and (max-width: 767px) {
	
	#alerts-container {
		position: fixed;
		top: 0;
		z-index: 999;
		width: 100%;
	}

}
```


----------



## Francisco (Jun 16, 2013)

Since I've had almost a dozen people ask me already, no, we will not be licensing copies of stallion. Yes, we're aware that SolusVM has a really nasty exploit but Stallion will *not* be up for sale for the masses.

We stand by our comment that we'll likely pick a few hosts to give a copy to but that's it.

Francisco


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 16, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Since I've had almost a dozen people ask me already, no, we will not be licensing copies of stallion. Yes, we're aware that SolusVM has a really nasty exploit but Stallion will *not* be up for sale for the masses.
> 
> 
> We stand by our comment that we'll likely pick a few hosts to give a copy to but that's it.
> ...


Sir,

I will eat Grass, hay and corn for the rest of my life.


----------



## SkylarM (Jun 16, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Since I've had almost a dozen people ask me already, no, we will not be licensing copies of stallion. Yes, we're aware that SolusVM has a really nasty exploit but Stallion will *not* be up for sale for the masses.
> 
> 
> We stand by our comment that we'll likely pick a few hosts to give a copy to but that's it.
> ...


Well now that's just no fun


----------



## Francisco (Jun 19, 2013)

To whomever shoved /sbin/reboot into /etc/rc.local on the test VM and rebooted it? Well played.

You get a +1 for trolling me for a few minutes 

Francisco


----------



## MannDude (Jun 19, 2013)

Added a Pony avatar. Thought this thread should be updated to reflect my hard work. ony: Neigh!


----------



## Francisco (Jun 19, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Added a Pony avatar. Thought this thread should be updated to reflect my hard work. ony: Neigh!


That's just awesome. Thanks boss 

At this point we have 2 outstanding list pages for the admin side to complete. I have some final provisioning testing to do for KVM's but other than that we're looking good. Aldryic has been working away at the import script.

We're likely going to schedule 12 hours to complete the migration but I fully expect to see it done in under an hour.

Lets talk about our alerts system for a few minutes. Right now our monitoring system logs things to internal systems, but the plan is to log useful things to the end user (abusive processes, super high CPU/IO, etc). Would you want us to do hourly 'heads up' on all warnings you've had in the past hour? Of course, if you have no alerts it won't email you but if you had something going wacky it won't spam you with emails either.

Francisco


----------



## Steve (Jun 19, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Would you want us to do hourly 'heads up' on all warnings you've had in the past hour? Of course, if you have no alerts it won't email you but if you had something going wacky it won't spam you with emails either.


 

Yup. An option to disable receiving these emails would probably be useful too.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 19, 2013)

Steve said:


> Yup. An option to disable receiving these emails would probably be useful too.


Disabling is a no go. If your VM is slamming the hell out of alerts you better look into it  Especially if your VM gets suspended for being exploited.

Francisco


----------



## mojeda (Jun 19, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Disabling is a no go. If your VM is slamming the hell out of alerts you better look into it  Especially if your VM gets suspended for being exploited.
> 
> 
> Francisco


This


----------



## acd (Jun 19, 2013)

Can we bribe one of you guys to make an XMPP/jabber message in addition/instead? I know Pony knows how to do that. =D

It would also be especially useful to be able set a custom alert level that is lower than the buyvm limit level so we can tune our io/cpu/ram warnings to our application's normal levels.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 22, 2013)

We've continued our cleanup plans as well as getting provisioning for KVM based VM's working.

While I was at it I've also made it so swapping ISO's does *not* require powering off your VPS.

You can now swap ISO's as you see fit. Please remember, if you mount the ISO

within linux it'll be marked as 'locked' and won't be able to be ejected.

Francisco


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 23, 2013)

Off-topic, since pony is getting a new stallion, will the farm get renovated (main site)? Come on Fran! Loosen up your tight wallet.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 23, 2013)

SeriesN said:


> Off-topic, since pony is getting a new stallion, will the farm get renovated (main site)? Come on Fran! Loosen up your tight wallet.


Yes  The same fellow that did stallion is doing the website. He's having some trouble coming up with ideas for it though so I told him to take a few weeks off it and work on other projects. He'll come back to it and i'm sure it'll look great.

Francisco


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 23, 2013)

Om.nom nom! Corn and grass never tasted this good.



Francisco said:


> Yes  The same fellow that did stallion is doing the website. He's having some trouble coming up with ideas for it though so I told him to take a few weeks off it and work on other projects. He'll come back to it and i'm sure it'll look great.
> 
> 
> Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (Jun 23, 2013)

Is there an official release date that I missed somewhere? Very curious when I can expect to see this in full action.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 23, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Is there an official release date that I missed somewhere? Very curious when I can expect to see this in full action.


Nothing concrete. I was aiming for the 23rd (tomorrow) but I got caught up dealing with a storage node misbehaving in LV.

Honestly we're at polish stage. The only thing pending is Aldryic's import scripts.

Once that's in place i'll outline what milestone 2 will include. I'm trying to decide if I want to go balls deep with the statistics part of it or not 

Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (Jun 23, 2013)

Francisco said:


> I was aiming for the 23rd (tomorrow)


May I point you to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fullscreen.html?n=179


----------



## Francisco (Jun 23, 2013)

Dammit 

Francisco


----------



## D. Strout (Jun 23, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Dammit


Sooo... the 24th?


----------



## Francisco (Jun 23, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Sooo... the 24th?


I don't want to rush Aldryic 

I expect it to only take him a few hours. I'll have a few changes to make to the queue runner but that won't take

me more than a few hours as well.

Francisco


----------



## acd (Jun 23, 2013)

No, he just forgot what day it was.  If I recall correctly, it took a couple days for him to get everything fixed up with the disk failures on that wonky storage box, so he might need a couple extra days, if not a week for S2. Customers have been priority 1 for Fran, with projects following after. It's one of his best qualities as a provider.


----------



## SeriesN (Jun 23, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Dammit
> 
> 
> Francisco


Catnip! Never! Not even once!


----------



## D. Strout (Jun 23, 2013)

Oh, yeah, I understand. Whenever you're ready. I was meaning to ask if the 24th is what you meant?


----------



## jenok (Jun 24, 2013)

bootstrap theme, looks great !!


----------



## Francisco (Jun 24, 2013)

jenok said:


> bootstrap theme, looks great !!


Yes but I like to think it looks better than the usual bootstrap skins 

Francisco


----------



## Nick_A (Jun 24, 2013)

:drool:


----------



## ShardHost (Jun 24, 2013)

Nick_A said:


> :drool:


This does indeed look very good.  I'm sure you guys are very happy coming up to this milestone after the development problems you suffered in the beginning.  Must feel great to have got this far taking control of it yourself.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 24, 2013)

ShardHost said:


> This does indeed look very good.  I'm sure you guys are very happy coming up to this milestone after the development problems you suffered in the beginning.  Must feel great to have got this far taking control of it yourself.


Thanks 

And yes, we're very proud of the outcome, especially considering the timeline.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jun 29, 2013)

Depending on Aldryic's schedule, we're looking at doing a roll out on July 4th.

We'll start right in the morning (~9 AM PST) and book 12 hours. I expect the whole roll out to only take an hour or so

though.

I'm working on adding vserver status to the dashboard you see on login. The big issue is making it so there isn't lag or a ton of waiting time for users.

Francisco


----------



## jarland (Jun 29, 2013)

Did I read that right? Fireworks all over the US for the release party?


----------



## D. Strout (Jun 29, 2013)

jarland said:


> Did I read that right? Fireworks all over the US for the release party?


Yeah. _Definitely_  for the Stallion 2 release  Can't wait though. Gotta say I like what I'm seeing in the panel arena. Stallion 2, Tortoise Labs' panel, Feathur a.k.a. BlueCP. All great panels.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 29, 2013)

I wanted Aldryic on hand incase there's any problems with his import scripts or WHMCS  He knows WHMCS better than anyone at the company.

Besides, i'd love to ring in the good times with everyone around, not just Anthony & I.

Francisco


----------



## ryanarp (Jun 29, 2013)

Very awesome!!! Can't wait to see all the pieces finally coming together. Tis be a grand celebration 4th of July.


----------



## Francisco (Jun 29, 2013)

ryanarp said:


> Very awesome!!! Can't wait to see all the pieces finally coming together. Tis be a grand celebration 4th of July.


Yep  Then milestone 2 starts.

Francisco


----------



## MannDude (Jun 29, 2013)

Can't wait for the release!

Will you be putting in into production on the 4th for the existing BuyVM customers?


----------



## Francisco (Jun 30, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Can't wait for the release!
> 
> Will you be putting in into production on the 4th for the existing BuyVM customers?


Yus 

That's why there'll be an outage on the panel. I'll have Anthony on tickets to handle any reboots/etc that users need while it's down.

Francisco


----------



## ShardHost (Jun 30, 2013)

Any promos to coincide?  Will be picking up a VPS to check out the panel, just wondering if to pick one up now or wait until the 4th


----------



## Francisco (Jun 30, 2013)

ShardHost said:


> Any promos to coincide?  Will be picking up a VPS to check out the panel, just wondering if to pick one up now or wait until the 4th


None on the menu yet  The guys are generally against promo's.

But, maybe I can swing something.

Francisco


----------



## ShardHost (Jun 30, 2013)

Francisco said:


> None on the menu yet  The guys are generally against promo's.
> 
> 
> But, maybe I can swing something.
> ...


Now you've put me in the same position I was before!  Maybe I should buy one now and another if you run a promo.


----------



## MannDude (Jun 30, 2013)

Looking forward to the release for sure!


----------



## Francisco (Jun 30, 2013)

ShardHost said:


> Now you've put me in the same position I was before!  Maybe I should buy one now and another if you run a promo.


Any promo we do (be it more resources, etc) would be retroactive  We have some changes we want to make in mind but we need to complete some hardware changes first.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jul 1, 2013)

Rollout moved to Wednesday night since Aldryic has the time free 

We'll have an official email sent out in the morning documenting everything.

Francisco


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 2, 2013)

Aaaaand, mass email is currently underway. We'll kick things off at 1800h PST, bring both WHMCS and Stallion1 down into maintenance mode while the deployment is underway.


----------



## D. Strout (Jul 2, 2013)

Aldryic C said:


> Aaaaand, mass email is currently underway. We'll kick things off at 1800h PST, bring both WHMCS and Stallion1 down into maintenance mode while the deployment is underway.


I haven't received anything yet, almost half an hour later. Should I have?


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 2, 2013)

> I haven't received anything yet, almost half an hour later. Should I have?


I've got a timed queue going - almost 13000 active accounts, still have about 4 hours remaining before all the emails are sent >_>


----------



## D. Strout (Jul 2, 2013)

Aldryic C said:


> I've got a timed queue going - almost 13000 active accounts, still have about 4 hours remaining before all the emails are sent >_>


I thought it might be something like that. Never will understand how - what, four of you? - handle the support requests from 13,000 accounts while also managing servers and still releasing new stock. Also, is the Stallion upgrade responsible for the 0 stock right now?


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 2, 2013)

> Never will understand how - what, four of you? - handle the support requests from 13,000 accounts while also managing servers and still releasing new stock.


We drink. A _LOT_ 

Two of us actually.. Anthony (bzImage) and I handle tickets/support/orders. Fran does some support in IRC, and the vast majority of the coding/development/PR. Anthony and I work opposite shifts (I cover from ~6am till 10 or 11pm, he covers from ~noon till 4 or 5am), and we both have various alarms set to wake us up should anything need immediate attention. Anthony pretty much solos node maintenance/etc, and anything under billing/abuse/policy comes to my desk.


Stock is pulled for the moment due to Filtering, actually. We had a bit of a rush of orders with Filtered IPs lately, and it burned through what was left of that second /24 we added. I have an open ticket with CNS now to see about getting a /22 assigned - as soon as that's taken care of we'll be restocking again. I just didn't want people to have to wait or need refunds/etc due to no Filtered IPs being available. In the meantime, if someone's needing a plan without filtering (or with.. but we only have a handful of IPs left) they can just throw me a ticket and I'll square 'em away.


----------



## MannDude (Jul 2, 2013)

I mentioned this to Fran elsewhere, but it'd be nice to see a password blacklist that would not allow clients to utilize easy passwords to bruteforce.

Things like: root, password, passw0rd, password123, server, etc should not be allowed.

You could even go a bit further to ensure clients use secure passwords by setting up something that would disallow the hostname of their VPS to be a password, or combinations that may be easy to guess like first initial + last name, etc.

And if that annoys the customers, there should be an option to just generate a strong password.

I can see it now:

_Fuck, cant use 'password'. WTF?! It won't let me use 'r00t'... Hmm... 'server1'. WHAT?? UHG! I'll use the generate password feature... 'fcOFW7*a1VDDdZ#E1Qg1ZeCbxfZiio1j' what the fuck is this?!_


----------



## Francisco (Jul 2, 2013)

I'll add that to a point release after roll 

I don't like enforcing the 'strong password' thing since they're hard to remember. Passing special characters to vzctl can be annoying as well so we've enforced the following policy:



> Root passwords must be a minimum of 8 characters and only contain alphanumeric, dash, & underscore characters. Please login to your virtual server if you wish to use special characters.


Francisco


----------



## jcaleb (Jul 2, 2013)

Congrats for finishing the panel!


----------



## joepie91 (Jul 2, 2013)

Francisco said:


> I'll add that to a point release after roll
> 
> 
> I don't like enforcing the 'strong password' thing since they're hard to remember. Passing special characters to vzctl can be annoying as well so we've enforced the following policy:
> ...


Why not just do something like this? https://github.com/joepie91/cvm/blob/develop/runhelper/runhelper

PHP passes on the to-be-run command to the Python script in base64-encoded form (so no escaping madness), Python then runs it and provides the output in JSON format (this was to deal with the lack of proper output handling in php-ssh2 when I was still using it).

You could just do the same for the root password (ie. send a base64-encoded version to a Python script that uses Popen with list syntax to actually run the vzctl command, no escaping required).


----------



## Francisco (Jul 2, 2013)

joepie91 said:


> Why not just do something like this? https://github.com/joepie91/cvm/blob/develop/runhelper/runhelper
> 
> PHP passes on the to-be-run command to the Python script in base64-encoded form (so no escaping madness), Python then runs it and provides the output in JSON format (this was to deal with the lack of proper output handling in php-ssh2 when I was still using it).
> 
> You could just do the same for the root password (ie. send a base64-encoded version to a Python script that uses Popen with list syntax to actually run the vzctl command, no escaping required).


An interesting idea but for now lets just roll what we have working  From there I can start making a list of improvements as well as timelines on it.

Thanks,

Francisco


----------



## film_girl (Jul 3, 2013)

Looks awesome Fran! I was so psyched when I got the email I went to investigate, found this board. Seriously, looks totally hot. And I for one really appreciate the mobile friendly design. I know my husband (who I converted into a BuyVM fanboy) will dig it too since he's on his iPad mini half the time and this will make it super easy to manage stuff.

Great work!


----------



## wlanboy (Jul 3, 2013)

Aldryic C said:


> Aaaaand, mass email is currently underway.


And right into my spam folder 

My two highlights noone mentioned:


*Dual Logins* (!!!)
*No Java for console and VNC*

*PS:*

1800h PST so it is _1.00am GMT - that's _thursday!


----------



## acd (Jul 3, 2013)

Oh shi----

*tw covers his naughty bits*


----------



## MannDude (Jul 3, 2013)

acd said:


> Oh shi----
> 
> *tw covers his naughty bits*


Uh oh. Are we going to see it _before_ the 4th?


----------



## MannDude (Jul 3, 2013)

Hai Fran. Ready. ony:


----------



## bzImage (Jul 3, 2013)

acd said:


> Oh shi----
> 
> *tw covers his naughty bits*


Francisco tried to apply an Acceptable Use Policy to Pony's dong but he ended up having to sit on one of these for a week.


----------



## wlanboy (Jul 3, 2013)

Can we offer any cockies to the pony to speed up things?

B.t.w.: I would choose Amanda:


No proprietary device drivers
No proprietary format - just GNU utils
Good documentation & community


----------



## Shados (Jul 4, 2013)

Francisco said:


> I'll add that to a point release after roll
> 
> 
> I don't like enforcing the 'strong password' thing since they're hard to remember. Passing special characters to vzctl can be annoying as well so we've enforced the following policy:
> ...


Consider forcing/generating a six or seven word+ diceware password - they're plenty strong, and much easier to remember / type.


----------



## MannDude (Jul 4, 2013)

I think you should add a 'Bing' (yeah yeah) like feature so the login page of Stallion has a daily stallion / pony related background.


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

Shados said:


> Consider forcing/generating a six or seven word+ diceware password - they're plenty strong, and much easier to remember / type.


If you have an example I can look into it 

Francisco


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 4, 2013)

Francisco said:


> If you have an example I can look into it


"gohomebzyouredrunk" >_>


----------



## George_Fusioned (Jul 4, 2013)

film_girl said:


> Looks awesome Fran! I was so psyched when I got the email I went to investigate, found this board. Seriously, looks totally hot. And I for one really appreciate the mobile friendly design. I know my husband (who I converted into a BuyVM fanboy) will dig it too since he's on his iPad mini half the time and this will make it super easy to manage stuff.
> 
> Great work!


w00t Christina from Mashable at VPSboard  Welcome!


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

Had some delays, sorry about that.

Had some bugs with our queue runner since we moved to debian 7 for this box.

I got a couple cron scripts to quickly right but past that I think it's ready for opening 

Francisco


----------



## Ivan (Jul 4, 2013)

Saw the tweet, congratulations on the launch guys 

Keep up the great work, Francisco and Aldryic.


----------



## MannDude (Jul 4, 2013)

"You must power off your virtual server for new KVM settings to take effect."

Did that, turned it back on, still get the message. Wasn't for vpsBoard anyhow 

Lookin' nice!

EDIT: Wait, nevermind. I thought the message meant I had to power off / power on for new settings to appear in the control panel or something. I'm tired.


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

MannDude said:


> "You must power off your virtual server for new KVM settings to take effect."
> 
> Did that, turned it back on, still get the message. Wasn't for vpsBoard anyhow
> 
> Lookin' nice!


Which message? 

Take a screen if you can.

Francisco


----------



## MannDude (Jul 4, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Which message?
> 
> 
> Take a screen if you can.
> ...




I think it's just a general warning that changes require a reboot to take effect? Before I thought I had to reboot for options to become available to me, but that doesn't make sense. I'm tired.


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

MannDude said:


> I think it's just a general warning that changes require a reboot to take effect? Before I thought I had to reboot for options to become available to me, but that doesn't make sense. I'm tired.


I'll check my franmar on there then 

Francisco


----------



## wdq (Jul 4, 2013)

Congrats on the new panel.

I just experienced a pretty minor bug where if you request a password reset the email you receive has a link to the server's IP address. If you click the link it sends you to that server and says the reset key is invalid. When I copied the end of the URL onto the correct domain everything worked.


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

wdq said:


> Congrats on the new panel.
> 
> I just experienced a pretty minor bug where if you request a password reset the email you receive has a link to the server's IP address. If you click the link it sends you to that server and says the reset key is invalid. When I copied the end of the URL onto the correct domain everything worked.


Thanks! I shouldn't have hardcoded that email 

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Thanks! I shouldn't have hardcoded that email
> 
> Francisco


All fixed.

Francisco


----------



## jarland (Jul 4, 2013)

It's freaking beautiful!


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

Thank you 

Thank you everyone as well that has taken the time to submit bug reports.

Francisco


----------



## wlanboy (Jul 4, 2013)

Good job - really good job.


----------



## ryanarp (Jul 4, 2013)

It is glorious I tell you, glorious. Going to give it a good spin repurposing a few of my VM.


----------



## D. Strout (Jul 4, 2013)

Found and reported a bug concerning handling multiple notification option changes under /profile


----------



## Francisco (Jul 4, 2013)

Fixed the notification stuff. I reset everyone to 'all checked' which fixes the bugs.

Francisco


----------



## eva2000 (Jul 5, 2013)

oooh nice Fran, just logged into the new Stallion CP  B)



> Report a Franning


lol


----------



## Francisco (Jul 5, 2013)

eva2000 said:


> oooh nice Fran, just logged into the new Stallion CP  B)
> 
> lol


 

We've fixed the RAM accounting on 2.6.32. We pushed an update to all nodes running .32 that has allocated users vswap.

Swap is now also charted on the overview page.

Still more things to clean up and likely a bug in console ACL's to fix 

Thanks everyone for the continued support. This panel is turning out amazing and minus the few minor bugs has been going off w/o a hitch.

Francisco


----------



## dnom (Jul 5, 2013)

Francisco said:


> We've fixed the RAM accounting on 2.6.32. We pushed an update to all nodes running .32 that has allocated users vswap.


 

Great! Nice to see my ram usage halved


----------



## CoolMoon (Jul 5, 2013)

Anywhere I can find my current installed system info?


----------



## Francisco (Jul 5, 2013)

CoolMoon said:


> Anywhere I can find my current installed system info?


Not until you reinstall or mount an ISO.

The data stallion 1 had was horribly inaccurate since I had broken that ages ago >_>

I didn't even know I broke it till late last year and by then S2 was too close.

Francisco


----------



## jcaleb (Jul 7, 2013)

It's my first time to login to my panel in a long time. Is this Stallion 2 already? It looks so beautiful! Man, wow!


----------



## Francisco (Jul 7, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> It's my first time to login to my panel in a long time. Is this Stallion 2 already? It looks so beautiful! Man, wow!


Roll out was last week  Adding some missing features that didn't make it to production, namely nullroute notifications.

Thanks!

Francisco


----------



## jcaleb (Jul 7, 2013)

Change profile password does not seem to work.


----------



## Francisco (Jul 7, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> Change profile password does not seem to work.


I'll test it out 

Francisco


----------



## jcaleb (Jul 8, 2013)

I try 2x and not working. What I did was reset password. Then I used the password sent to me to login. Then I changed it to a better password. But cant log using it. The sent password to me still works


----------



## Francisco (Jul 8, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> I try 2x and not working. What I did was reset password. Then I used the password sent to me to login. Then I changed it to a better password. But cant log using it. The sent password to me still works


Nice catch!

All fixed up. We had the user profile always locked during beta so people didn't put retarded things for the name so that never got tested 

All fixed.

Francisco


----------



## jcaleb (Jul 8, 2013)

thanks for the fix!


----------



## egihosting (Jul 9, 2013)

Just logged into Stallion 2 and it looks great.

I like the simple look. Possible to get the Pony heads in default templates in the reinstall tab in a rainbow of colors? =)

-james


----------



## Francisco (Jul 9, 2013)

egihosting said:


> Just logged into Stallion 2 and it looks great.
> 
> I like the simple look. Possible to get the Pony heads in default templates in the reinstall tab in a rainbow of colors? =)
> 
> -james


Bahahha

I need to remake the OS images since most are missing.

I need to fix the background on the console. I forgot to save that in my codebase.

Francisco


----------



## MannDude (Jul 12, 2013)

I've been meaning to ask you this: Why is the default domain name in the Debian ISO setup 'prescreenedprofessionals.com'?


----------



## acd (Jul 12, 2013)

Check your VM's RDNS. I believe that is how debian guesses.


----------



## George_Fusioned (Jul 12, 2013)

acd said:


> Check your VM's RDNS. I believe that is how debian guesses.


That's it


----------



## D. Strout (Jul 13, 2013)

acd said:


> Check your VM's RDNS. I believe that is how debian guesses.


So...how was his rDNS set to that? "Leftovers" from the previous client on that IP? Shouldn't the CP clear that out automatically?


----------



## Francisco (Jul 13, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> So...how was his rDNS set to that? "Leftovers" from the previous client on that IP? Shouldn't the CP clear that out automatically?


Correct 

Stallion 1 didn't clean it out.

Francisco


----------



## MannDude (Jul 14, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Correct
> 
> 
> Stallion 1 didn't clean it out.
> ...


Does Stallion 2 clean that out now?


----------



## Nikki (Jul 17, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Does Stallion 2 clean that out now?


Pretty sure it does, as I remember this was one of the many small fixes mentioned for Stallion2 a while ago, and I highly doubt something like this would be overlooked 

That being said, this is honestly the best panel I've ever used, it flows nicely and has great features


----------



## MannDude (Jul 17, 2013)

Nikki said:


> Pretty sure it does, as I remember this was one of the many small fixes mentioned for Stallion2 a while ago, and I highly doubt something like this would be overlooked
> 
> That being said, this is honestly the best panel I've ever used, it flows nicely and has great features


I'd check to see if it was fixed, but don't have any VPSes that I *can't* re-install as they're all production now.


----------



## VPSCorey (Jul 17, 2013)

looks good


----------



## Francisco (Jul 17, 2013)

FRCorey said:


> looks good


I should have a list of 'upcoming features' soon 

Right now I'm working on getting DHCP working in both locations.

It used to work in LV sometime last year but it was quite broken. It never worked in Buffalo since I didn't want to bother

writing a module for it with stallion 2 being worked on at the time.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jul 23, 2013)

Client API will be available sometime this afternoon 

It emulates the solusVM API fully.

Once rolled out you'll find the 'API' controls under the 'settings' tab of your VPS.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Jul 24, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Client API will be available sometime this afternoon
> 
> It emulates the solusVM API fully.
> 
> ...


This was rolled out yesterday 

Next project will likely be per VPS /64 allocations.

We're working on an internal replacement for libvirt so we can bring even more features.

Thanks for the continued interest & support,

Francisco


----------



## Ruchirablog (Jul 24, 2013)

What about integrating the DNS manager on stallion boss?


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 24, 2013)

Ruchirablog said:


> What about integrating the DNS manager on stallion boss?


That'll be released once support/billing are merged into Stallion2. Same with Offloaded SQL, we'll be moving off of cPanel completely :3


----------



## Ruchirablog (Jul 25, 2013)

Aldryic C said:


> That'll be released once support/billing are merged into Stallion2. Same with Offloaded SQL, we'll be moving off of cPanel completely :3


Please build an disk image backup solution and BuyVM will be complete :3


----------



## Francisco (Jul 31, 2013)

Decided we needed to improve how the reinstall/mount ISO pages looked:







I think it flows a lot better 

The ISO page still has to be updated but I'm finishing that in the morning.

Once that's done I'll be working on our 'media vault', for those of you that like custom ISO's.

Francisco


----------



## clarity (Jul 31, 2013)

Fran,

Did you get that other bug taken care of that we talked about in IRC? The one were saving changes to the IP addresses screws up the internal network connection to the MySQL server?


----------



## Francisco (Jul 31, 2013)

dclardy said:


> Fran,
> 
> Did you get that other bug taken care of that we talked about in IRC? The one were saving changes to the IP addresses screws up the internal network connection to the MySQL server?


No I forgot to note it down before I took a nap  I'll finish it today.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Aug 6, 2013)

Been working away at the per VPS IPV6 subnets:

This screen is what you'll get when you're migrating from randomized IP's into your dedicated /64:



This popup is what you'll use when you're attaching a single, specific, IP address:



I hope to have it rolled out by the end of the week at the latest.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Aug 7, 2013)

This feature should be rolled out on either Thursday or Friday 

We're still deciding if we want to allow block assigning. My concern is since there is no

page refreshing someone could spam up a thousand or two entries and grind their poor OVZ into

the ground.

Francisco


----------



## Dan (Aug 9, 2013)

It's coming along and looks very very nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111!11!!!!!

Good job.


----------



## Francisco (Aug 9, 2013)

Thanks 

Just wrapping up the last of the customer subnets code. It will be available within the next 15 minutes.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Aug 9, 2013)

https://twitter.com/FrantechCA/status/365714675079450624

Hurrah!

Next up, media vault.


----------



## Jade (Aug 9, 2013)

Great job, I'm really liking this!


----------



## nixcom (Aug 9, 2013)

Good work! Looks amazing!


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Aug 20, 2013)

Alright folks, time for Phase II.  I've started work on the support system, and while I sadly won't have any screenshots for you for awhile (my dev pages are quite literally blank screens with text until Fran prettys them up.. I _hate_ design work -_-), I would like to get some input before I get to far into this.

Support is rather basic, and (coding quality aside) WHMCS does a decent enough job for support tickets, so I'll be taking a very (visually) similar approach.  That said.. does anyone have a recommendation/feature request they would like to see implemented?  Something traditional support systems lack that would be useful or informative?


----------



## acd (Aug 20, 2013)

_*edit: *My language comprehension ability appears to be low this morning as you requested features specific to support/ticketing. The following is just general billing related, sorry about that._

 

Hi Pony. I realize this list is huge and some of it just isn't reasonable, but these are my "demands" in approximately priority order.

 

Technical/Capabilities:

1. Single signon to both manage and client area. Transition away from PonyVM#####.

2. User generate invoice for account pre-payment with user adjustable amount and a minimum size of a reasonable value, like 20 USD.

3. Allow buying bandwidth desynchronized from the service term (ie, buy extra bandwidth for THIS month but not the remaining 5 months of service)

   3.a Allow turning on auto-bandwidth purchasing instead of auto-suspend, but defaults to off. Would require positive acct balance, etc.

4. Synchronize service display name in billing with service display name in manage.

5. User adjustable invoice pregeneration period (so instead of 10 days, maybe as much as a month in advance or as little as 5 days)

6. Better cart order locking for services (I don't recall anyone saying their order got cancelled due to availability, but I know WHMCS's inability to reserve instances IS a problem)

   6.a A little countdown saying "your cart expires in X minutes"

   6.b Necessary features to prevent DOS abuse of such locking =(

7. User selectable renewal period.

   7.a optionally, the ability to trucate this renewal cycle to the selected renewal length, with appropriate pro-rated credits/charges. Not really necessary, but would be convenient.

8. Pay multiple invoices in 1 transaction (or open invoice merging, etc)

   8.a on an invoice merge, lift minimum prepay transaction limit.

9. User adjustable invoice email-to list per service. Main account email cannot be removed (though might be BCCed, if appropriate)

   9.a default list for new services.

10. Tabular payment history with the following fields:

   10.a Date invoiced

   10.b Affected services

   10.c Amount

   10.d Date paid

   10.e Payment source (A generic label or icon like Paypal, Google checkout, etc, would be sufficient, not necessarily the pay-by acct)

   10.f Somehow show account credits and credit date/cancellation date/etc.

11. Generate above payment history by user selectable date window (up to 1 year with flexible start and end dates)

   11.a Summary for the date window.

   11.b If you were super awesome, you could filter this by service/subacct/service group.

12. Preordering for accounts with existing services, good standing and sufficient account credits (which would be set as "reserved for preorder" so as not to be consumed by renewals)

13. Automatically announce casualty Friday stock turnover to the appropriate ML.

14. Ordering/provisioning API.

 

Display related:

1. Show a "not available" or "out of stock" button instead of an order now link when there is no stock in that category.

2. filter inactive services (or show only inactive services)

   2.a Preference to show or hide inactive services by default

   2.b Preference for number of services to show by default.

3. Sort services by:

   3.a next invoice date

   3.b deploy date/first invoice date

   3.c cost per month or annum

   3.d (average resource or bandwidth usage)

   3.e (last resource or bandwidth usage)

4. Show icons for available addon features on the service selection page (more bw, more disk, more IPs, aegis, etc)

   4.a Generally better description of suitable usages for a particular VM product to ease selection for new users.

5. View list of referred accounts.

 

best regards,

-tw, maker of trouble, rouser of rabbles.


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Aug 20, 2013)

_Becca sighed softly, school had just ended for her and as usual she headed home to unwind. Upon reaching her house, she let herself in and immediately...._

*cough* >_>

Fantastic ideas suh.  A good number are already on my to-do list, and I've got a great list to work off of now when we start the billing dev.  I won't be doing any more scripts for WHMCS (number 4) since I'd rather devote my time to S2 dev than trying to fix up that broken ioncubed mess any more <_< 

I'll be getting all of the support-side done before I start on Billing, so there's still plenty of time to hash ideas out


----------



## Francisco (Aug 23, 2013)

For those interested:

KVM templates will be supported sometime next week.

Templates for Windows 2003, 2008, & 2012 will be available.

Windows 2012 will also be included in our KVM pricing.

Enjoy!

Francisco


----------



## Ruchirablog (Aug 24, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Windows 2012 will also be included in our KVM pricing.
> 
> 
> Enjoy!
> ...


Thank you Sir!  ony:  :wub:  ony:


----------



## ultimatehostings (Sep 1, 2013)

Great job done here, bootstrap was the best choice.


----------



## Francisco (Sep 1, 2013)

Thanks!

KVM templates were rolled out earlier this week.

Right now we're looking for feedback on pricing for backups:

http://vpsboard.com/topic/1767-feedback-on-prices-for-backupssnapshots/


----------



## Francisco (Dec 11, 2013)

Hopefully the mods don't beat my head too hard for necro'ing such an old thread.

Been working on the frontend pages for backups today.







Nothing too insane but since there isn't many restrictions in play there isn't a lot of information to display to the user.

Francisco


----------



## Coastercraze (Dec 12, 2013)

Yes please wipe all data off THIS.IS.SPARTA


----------



## SrsX (Dec 13, 2013)

Francisco, I don't see you really talk about the Framework you choose to build it off, if you don't mind could you answer a few questions?

Why you choose this framework?

What unique items it has to it which makes it better then writing it manually?

Is it better then other frameworks like Laravel, etc?

Just wondering as I'm interested to see why you chose it.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 13, 2013)

SrsX said:


> Francisco, I don't see you really talk about the Framework you choose to build it off, if you don't mind could you answer a few questions?
> 
> Why you choose this framework?
> 
> ...


We chose CI because it's a great framework with some really really useful functionality but isn't so heavy that it's getting in the way.

It has a pretty decent database ORM and the sanitizing classes are top notch.

I'd get really tired of writing chained IF statements to validate if things are ints as well as ranges, instead of just a simple:

->set_rules('backupid', '', 'trim|required|is_natural_no_zero');

It just makes life a lot easier.

Stallion 1 was 'per page' procedural and I wanted to hang myself by the end of it. I got tired of writing SQL queries by hand all the damn time, especially when I made large database changes (splitting tables, etc).

CI is an older framework but there is a huuuuge community behind it and I had no issues finding solid examples to work from.

Francisco


----------



## SrsX (Dec 13, 2013)

Francisco said:


> We chose CI becauase it's a great framework with some really really useful functionality but isn't so heavy that it's getting in the way.
> 
> 
> It has a pretty decent database ORM and the sanitizing classes are top notch.
> ...


I assume with the set_rules you're referring to mostly the form validation section? Also, would you recommend this framework to other people?


----------



## Francisco (Dec 13, 2013)

SrsX said:


> I assume with the set_rules you're referring to mostly the form validation section? Also, would you recommend this framework to other people?


Correct.

I have recommended it to some people. It really comes down to how much time you want to spend learning the way a system works. Since CI was started back in the PHP4 days, it feels more at home for me.

I'm not brushed up in all the crazy new functionality or design methodology that are available in PHP 5.3+, and that's OK. I'll learn them in time but there's nothing wrong with how CI does things. Sure, some other frameworks drop into IDE's properly (CI doesn't easily), but notepad++ is awesome so I got little room to bitch.

CI handles everything we need in stallion and handles it well. I honestly can't think of functions in stallion that CI wouldn't let us complete.

Francisco


----------



## SrsX (Dec 13, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Correct.
> 
> 
> I have recommended it to some people. It really comes down to how much time you want to spend learning the way a system works. Since CI was started back in the PHP4 days, it feels more at home for me.
> ...


Awesome, I might give it a shot then. Finally, as per stallion, for node connections how are you doing that? For example the master says create vps 0259 or something like that, how does it talk to the "slave" nodes.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 13, 2013)

SrsX said:


> Awesome, I might give it a shot then. Finally, as per stallion, for node connections how are you doing that? For example the master says create vps 0259 or something like that, how does it talk to the "slave" nodes.


You should poke around the newer firmwares as well, not just CI. CI, while feature complete, doesn't have its core developers anymore. They went off to do their own thing and only really commits bug fixes and such. Granted, CI's expandable enough that you can write quick functions to supply whatever you're missing.

For communication we use good old HTTPS. We originally planned to use a nodejs daemon with probably XMPP for communication, but in the end we were going to blow too much time remaking the wheel for no reason. It works quickly and keeps us within languages we're all accustomed to.

We run a lightweight webserver on each node that also runs a codeigniter instance. The biggest thing we needed was node side sanitizing of all data. Solus has shown what happens when you don't sanitize what gets sent to you, even in a supposed 'safe environment'. Solus' node side (did, or at least used to) take everything it was told and passed it right to the CLI via SETUID bins. This means if you fed it a $CTID param of "100;dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda", it runs the DD as root.

We had done a basic audit on Solus a few years ago and I was screaming about their poor coding practices since their big "LOL we removed BW rate limiting without telling you. Sorry about the overages!". They proceeded to try to SQL inject Stallion 1.

EDIT - fixing tense.

Francisco


----------



## zzrok (Dec 13, 2013)

Francisco said:


> You should poke around the newer firmwares as well, not just CI. CI, while feature complete, doesn't have its core developers anymore.


FWIW, a lot of Code Igniter users have found their way to Laravel.



SrsX said:


> Awesome, I might give it a shot then.


I would recommend against Code Igniter because, last I heard, Ellis Lab still controls it, but they tried to give up control many months ago.  No one stepped up to take over.  The framework is without strong leadership right now.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 13, 2013)

Correct 

Francisco


----------



## Wintereise (Dec 13, 2013)

Laravel is the de-facto way to go these days, pretty much.


----------



## thekreek (Dec 15, 2013)

Francisco, if you dont mind, what app are you using for the AJAX console.

I been looking for something like this to install on one of my VPS's in order to use it as a gate for the times im in a restricted network. I could use stallion since I have a VPS with you, but I dont want to abuse the system.

Hope to hear from you.

Thanks.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 15, 2013)

thekreek said:


> Francisco, if you dont mind, what app are you using for the AJAX console.
> 
> I been looking for something like this to install on one of my VPS's in order to use it as a gate for the times im in a restricted network. I could use stallion since I have a VPS with you, but I dont want to abuse the system.
> 
> ...


By all means, enjoy it! There isn't really a way to abuse it. It's there to be used however you like.

We use noVNC as a basis. For the actual proxying side of things we had to modify a bunch of novnc's code to handle things securely.

Francisco


----------



## k0nsl (Dec 16, 2013)

That's one badass panel, Francisco. At the end of this month I'll buy a VPS from your company just to try it out.

Very nice.

Regards,

k0nsl


----------



## texteditor (Dec 16, 2013)

k0nsl said:


> That's one badass panel, Francisco. At the end of this month I'll buy a VPS from your company just to try it out.
> 
> Very nice.
> 
> ...


Ran out of space to host your love letters to Hitler and holocaust-denial screeds already?


----------



## k0nsl (Dec 16, 2013)

Oh, it's the guy from LET who couldn't contain himself and subsequently got his posts deleted  

Nah. I have plenty of space. I might need a new one for the love letters, though!

Regards,

-k0nsl



texteditor said:


> Ran out of space to host your love letters to Hitler and holocaust-denial screeds already?


----------



## texteditor (Dec 16, 2013)

k0nsl said:


> Oh, it's the guy from LET who couldn't contain himself and subsequently got his posts deleted
> 
> Nah. I have plenty of space. I might need a new one for the love letters, though!
> 
> ...


Yeah Spirit (the mod) is a Nazi too, you should totally chat him up about Jews and minorities or whatever


----------



## k0nsl (Dec 16, 2013)

Sorry, unlike some people I'm not particularly obsessed with any of that. I come to these places to talk about VPSes and everything entailed in and around that topic, and perhaps a few other topics. But I didn't come here to talk about _*“Jews, and minorities or whatever”. *_You can do that all you want, though.

Best wishes  

-k0nsl



texteditor said:


> Yeah Spirit (the mod) is a Nazi too, you should totally chat him up about Jews and minorities or whatever


----------



## Aldryic C'boas (Dec 16, 2013)

This is pretty weaksauce offending.  You gents should drop by IRC, and learn a few things.  Ask for bfj or m0shbear.. they'll be happy to give a few tips


----------



## Francisco (Dec 16, 2013)

m0sh & bfj would make even the fuhrer blush.

Anyways, enough of that.

This discussion is for feedback & discussion of our panels features.

Francisco


----------



## HalfEatenPie (Dec 16, 2013)

C'mon guys.  Play nice here


----------



## mcmyhost (Dec 16, 2013)

> This discussion is for feedback & discussion of our panels features.
> 
> 
> Francisco



Could you integrate a translator (Google, Microsoft, etc..) into the support panel? 

Google is $20 for the API and Microsoft is free for up to 2M Words.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 16, 2013)

mcmyhost said:


> Could you integrate a translator (Google, Microsoft, etc..) into the support panel?
> 
> Google is $20 for the API and Microsoft is free for up to 2M Words.


That's not a bad idea 

I'll see what's possible.

We haven't put in much code for the new billing system yet since we're going back to square 1 a lot.

Francisco


----------



## HalfEatenPie (Dec 16, 2013)

Francisco said:


> That's not a bad idea
> 
> I'll see what's possible.
> 
> ...


 I hope square 1 is a fancy name for a stripper and doesn't mean going all the way back to the beginning.

Because you know...

Wanted it yesterday 

*Edit:* Please re-read "We haven't put in much code for the new billing system yet since we're going back to square 1 a lot." now that you know square 1 is a stripper name.  

All I'm going to say is... Bow chica bow wow. Billing system needs loving too!


----------



## vRozenSch00n (Dec 17, 2013)

HalfEatenPie said:


> All I'm going to say is... Bow chica bow wow. Billing system needs loving too!


 :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:


----------



## HalfEatenPie (Dec 17, 2013)

vRozenSch00n said:


> :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:  :wub:


You compile your code so well!


----------



## Francisco (Dec 17, 2013)

I got a reply notification and just saw a bunch of ": wub :: wub ::...." and was like "Are they writing out a dubstep song?"


----------



## budi1413 (Dec 17, 2013)

I have $20+ account credit with BuyVM for emergency use.


----------



## Francisco (Dec 17, 2013)

budi1413 said:


> I have $20+ account credit with BuyVM for emergency use.


 

I got delayed a little bit on backups due to some visual changes I wanted to make.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco (Dec 18, 2013)

So I need some feedback.

Right now I'm plotting out how to handle the 'mounting' feature but I've hit a snag.

As of right now, someone could max out their diskspace with whatever, create a snapshot, then run a reinstall. They could then 'mount' the old snapshot and have 2x the diskspace. While it sounds like an insane idea, some users can be very cheap 

So my proposal is to add a timer and or job lock to mounting. Once you mount the FS your VPS will be marked as busy until either the job finishes automatically after XY minutes/hours or you click 'unmount backup'.

Personally, I'm in favour and I'll explain why. Due to how we're 'mounting' the backups into a VPS, resetting/reinstalling/etc will make the mount drop anyway. If you're pulling backups/etc, then you wouldn't want someone else (or even just yourself) tampering inside stallion.

Granted, there will be a catch that will automatically clear the 'mount' flag if you issue a restart from inside your VPS anyways.

Right now I'm figuring *4 hours* as the maximum mount time to be a reasonable amount. If you can't pull your backups within that amount of time then you should probably restore the whole damn thing anyway.

Feedback?

Francisco


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## peterw (Dec 18, 2013)

Why not mounting it read only?


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## Francisco (Dec 18, 2013)

peterw said:


> Why not mounting it read only?


We will be but if you get someone that writes very few changes but is simply a pusher box? Then it can still get abused heavily.

Francisco


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## telephone (Dec 18, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Right now I'm figuring *4 hours* as the maximum mount time to be a reasonable amount. If you can't pull your backups within that amount of time then you should probably restore the whole damn thing anyway.
> 
> 
> Feedback?



How about just doing what SolusVM does for their 'Serial Console':

    - Limited to one active session per VPS

    - Drop-down list with available 'mounting' time blocks: 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours (maximum)

    - User has the option to unmount early (cancel/finished button)

    - At the appointed time limit, forcefully unmount

Other than that, I'd add a hard limit to the number of hours per day a backup can be mounted (per VPS):

    - Backups can only be mounted for 12 hours a day (use DB row to keep track)

        - This will prevent users from continuously mounting backups via a bot


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## Francisco (Dec 18, 2013)

Well, the thing with the unmounting is that if mount doesn't happen cleanly, it'll force power off the VPS to make sure it gets handled.

I was also thinking that the path we mount it to be partially randomized, that way you can't easily automate it.

We'd make a folder in /.stallion-3412edasdadasd or what have you and mount there. The folder would be different every time, that way there's no chance of overlapping with a users already existing folders and limits how easily a user can work around that. Granted, a bind mount would do it but that's still a lot of jiggering around to save a few dollars.

Francisco


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## fixidixi (Dec 18, 2013)

mcmyhost said:


> Could you integrate a translator (Google, Microsoft, etc..) into the support panel?
> 
> Google is $20 for the API and Microsoft is free for up to 2M Words.


To be honest I'm really i happy that there is still one place where i dont have to adblock that crappy google translate..

update: to be on the positive side: or there should be an option to turn it permanently on/off for a client


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## Aldryic C'boas (Aug 19, 2014)

So, here's another update several folks have asked for:

Pushed some code this morning that I've been working on - you can now login with your email address on file instead of the PonyVM#### generated username.


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## mojeda (Aug 19, 2014)

Aldryic C said:


> So, here's another update several folks have asked for:
> 
> Pushed some code this morning that I've been working on - you can now login with your email address on file instead of the PonyVM#### generated username.


Finally! Thank you, I always forget my PonyVM ID and have to go scavenge in my email.


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## Francisco (Oct 20, 2014)

Since we've been talking about the anycast/floating stuff getting integrated soon, I figured i'd necro this thread and include some early screenshots to the changes we're making to the IP Addresses interface.



As you can see, we've moved the 'reverse dns' link and put it into the sub menu. We had way too many people that didn't really 'get' the way we had it setup so it was best to simply redo it. I might get rid of the caret on the drop down menu, not sure yet.

On each IP you'll notice we include the hostname of the VPS that has that IP floating, just to make it a bit easier for the users to know where IP addresses are coming from.

ANYCAST IP's are always marked as floating/high availability just to make our lives easier with binding and such. With that being said, every OpeNVZ VPS, no matter the plan, will be getting an 'ha0' interface inside their service that they will push HA addresses over. KVM's won't need this, instead they'll be able to bind to the appropriate interface (eth0 for public, eth1 for internal).

I was originally wanting to live AJAX the add/delete option for IP's and such, but due to the delay OpenVZ can inflict on binding/unbinding large amounts of IP's, I felt it would feel a lot quicker if we just kept going with the 'save changes' way.

Francisco


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## HalfEatenPie (Oct 20, 2014)

I personally would really enjoy having the IP RAWR.RAWR.RAWR.  Can I put in a request for that?

Joking aside, could you clarify the hostname and the IPs?  I Don't see that on the screenshot or maybe I overlooked it?


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## Francisco (Oct 20, 2014)

HalfEatenPie said:


> I personally would really enjoy having the IP RAWR.RAWR.RAWR.  Can I put in a request for that?
> 
> Joking aside, could you clarify the hostname and the IPs?  I Don't see that on the screenshot or maybe I overlooked it?


I blanked out the IP address 

I'll take a new screenshot and just firebug in a random IP address.

Francisco


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## HalfEatenPie (Oct 20, 2014)

Francisco said:


> I blanked out the IP address
> 
> 
> I'll take a new screenshot and just firebug in a random IP address.
> ...


OH WAIT.

Is the hostname UNDER the IP?


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## Francisco (Oct 20, 2014)

HalfEatenPie said:


> OH WAIT.
> 
> Is the hostname UNDER the IP?


.....

Yes.

Francisco


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## HalfEatenPie (Oct 20, 2014)

Francisco said:


> .....
> 
> 
> Yes.
> ...


This exchange between us never happened.  

I feel stupid


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## DomainBop (Oct 20, 2014)

HalfEatenPie said:


> I personally would really enjoy having the IP RAWR.RAWR.RAWR.  Can I put in a request for that?


I already claimed the vaginalcyst.co.cc rDNS...


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## Francisco (Oct 21, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> I already claimed the vaginalcyst.co.cc rDNS...


I hate you guys 

Most of the data in here is compliments of bfj and co' in #frantech, they were the main bug testers.

Francisco


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## sshgroup (Nov 8, 2014)

good work


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## Francisco (Nov 20, 2014)

Since we're into the beta testing stage of the anycast/floating IP controls, I wanted to show how we've changed up the flow of the page. It isn't a complete overhaul, but it addresses some of the usability issues we had.

To start:



The new default page is fairly straight forward. A new table is dumped at the bottom of each section to handle floating or anycast IP's. For the sake of making my life easier, anycast IP's are *always* floating/in failover mode. I'll most likely add a collapse option to the right side of each table in the off chance a user has a lot of IP's.



A new drop down menu has been added to all IP address types that gains/loses options, based on if the IP address is in failover mode/Anycast, is IPv6, or if the VPS we're currently managing is the owner of it. We've moved the 'edit' icon for RDNS away from the middle of the row to a drop down menu since it was simply too confusing. You can still click on the RDNS text and get the modal, though.



Originally we had a paragraph or so of text on this popup that explained what enabling IP failover was about, but we decided to trim it and instead we'll link off to a wiki/knowledgebase article to go into heavy detail.



Deleting IPV6 addresses is no longer a complete pain in the ass. Originally we had live AJAX calls happening and this caused your VPS to be applying IP address add/removal every time you add/deleted. When I originally wrote this it was fine but I never took into consideration latency for calls outside the DC.

Delete's are now a visual thing, allowing delete/undo all you want w/o delay. The actual deleting from the database/pushing updates to the VPS happen once you click 'Save Changes'.



'Save Changes' has also been reworked to be AJAX based w/ a little blurb of text instead of a large warning at the top of the page as well as a self submit. The self submit setup worked fine but if you somehow gunked up the data that was submitted, you'd have to wait for the page to refresh to get any sort of feedback.

That's about it  There's a ton of backend changes that put this all together. This page gained 400 some odd lines of javascript and a ton of PHP on the backend side of things.

Any/all feedback is welcome.

Francisco


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## drmike (Nov 20, 2014)

Looks nice and simple Fran.


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## fixidixi (Nov 20, 2014)

@Fran:

do you also have such shiny tools for yourselves?


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## Francisco (Nov 20, 2014)

fixidixi said:


> @Fran:
> 
> do you also have such shiny tools for yourselves?


Nope.

The page users see to manage their VPS is the same one us administrators use. There's a lot of validation & security checks in place to allow that. There is an 'admin' tab for things like upgrade/downgrade plans, add/remove IP addresses, etc.

Everything else shares the same pages. It made our lives a lot easier than having 2 sides to things since there'd be chances that something works on the backend but is broken on the frontend (happened more than once on Stallion 1).

Francisco


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## fixidixi (Nov 20, 2014)

Ohh so there is one codebase to maintain . It must have been a nice challenge to plan a proper privilege separation .

Thanks for the intel!

Kudos on the continous upgrades!


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## splitice (Nov 20, 2014)

Francisco said:


> add a collapse option to the right side of each table in the off chance a user has a lot of IP's.


Sorry


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## Francisco (Nov 21, 2014)

So I'm thinking that I should add a 'Add anycast IPs' option into the panel where user can add a certain amount, to a cap, to themselves.

The system would have to do an eligibility check (VM's in every location, don't have more than $cap, etc), but I think it'd be a lot nicer for people to work with instead of having to ticket, etc.

What kind of limit would you all like to see? I was thinking 3, maybe 5 max for automatic provisioning. More available by ticket, of course.

Francisco


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## splitice (Nov 21, 2014)

Perhaps a limit increase system where you apply to get the limit raised (show eligibility)?

What do ARIN say?


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## Francisco (Nov 21, 2014)

splitice said:


> Perhaps a limit increase system where you apply to get the limit raised (show eligibility)?
> 
> What do ARIN say?


Anything past a /29 IP's in a row requires a SWIP. Given IP's are assigned randomly, though, that doesn't really apply.

Francisco


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## catatonic (Nov 21, 2014)

Francisco said:


> So I'm thinking that I should add a 'Add anycast IPs' option into the panel where user can add a certain amount, to a cap, to themselves.
> 
> 
> The system would have to do an eligibility check (VM's in every location, don't have more than $cap, etc), but I think it'd be a lot nicer for people to work with instead of having to ticket, etc.
> ...


3 would be perfect for what I'm planning - the ability to add an extra couple without of needing to raise a ticket would be nice too.


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## Francisco (Nov 21, 2014)

catatonic said:


> 3 would be perfect for what I'm planning - the ability to add an extra couple without of needing to raise a ticket would be nice too.


I'll go with 5 - 6 then 

I'll be working on the popup later today/tomorrow & will post pictures of it then. It'll be a simple modal, though, nothing crazy.

Francisco


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## OpticServers (Dec 3, 2014)

Looks Great so far! congratz


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## Francisco (Dec 3, 2014)

For a small update...

All the node side improvements needed to handle anycast have been completed & tested. At this point I have a bit more backend stuff to do related to security lock downs & provisioning. Fingers crossed I'd like to roll out the code either Saturday evening or Sunday.

Since some asked, we should have *IPV6 Anycast* supported later in the month. The code is all there, it's just that I really want a tiny vacation 

Francisco


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## Aldryic C'boas (Dec 4, 2014)

Francisco said:


> The code is all there, it's just that I really want a tiny vacation


READ: I'm going to nullroute the guy and revoke his keys if he doesn't take a break soon


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## Francisco (Dec 4, 2014)

Aldryic C said:


> READ: I'm going to nullroute the guy and revoke his keys if he doesn't take a break soon


I'm treating myself to so much shit this Christmas >_>

Fran


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## vRozenSch00n (Dec 5, 2014)

Hey @Aldryic C'boas & @Francisco, 

Take care of your health. Don't get over fatigue you two.


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## RTGHM (Dec 5, 2014)

Francisco said:


> I'm treating myself to so much shit this Christmas >_>
> 
> 
> Fran


Like? Did you purchase an actual pony this time?


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## Night (Dec 5, 2014)

Francisco said:


> For a small update...
> 
> 
> All the node side improvements needed to handle anycast have been completed & tested. At this point I have a bit more backend stuff to do related to security lock downs & provisioning. Fingers crossed I'd like to roll out the code either Saturday evening or Sunday.
> ...


Speaking of security lock downs, any plans for 2 factor authentication?


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## Aldryic C'boas (Dec 5, 2014)

2F Auth is already available for our billing panel - just need to throw me a ticket and I'll enable it on your account.  It is on the 'to-do' feature list for Stallion, we're just taking care of priority items first.


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## Francisco (Jan 23, 2015)

Night said:


> Speaking of security lock downs, any plans for 2 factor authentication?


I guess I need to decide what options to add  Maybe Yubikey + Google authenticator would be enough? I can put it on the TODO list after the next major overhaul.

So, about that overhaul. With bandwidth pooling well on its way to being merged, we're looking at completely overhauling our IPV6 platform. Here are the features I've come up with so far and wanted more feedback.

- Ability to delegate the nameservers of subnets to whatever nameservers you want

- Ability to allocate anycasted IPV6 addresses

- Ability to route additional /64's to a single IP address

- Ability to assign anycasted routed /64 subnets

- Ability to assign single anycasted IPV6 addresses from a communal /64?

- Change how IPV6 subnets are assigned*

Anything else?

We wouldn't allocate a /56 like linode does and static route it to a single VM. Customers would be able to assign/remove /64's as they please. All routing would be handled on our end making this pretty painless.

With the code merge we did for floating IP's, adding all these IPV6 improvements isn't all that difficult. This would also work perfectly fine for OpenVZ, we'd just have to force users to use VETH interfaces to make it work (just like they have to do now for anycasted addresses). You'd be able to enable/disable routing as well as change the destination IP of the static route (select box drop down).

The next big change would be to make it so we're properly allocating subnets, instead of how we do it now where users get a *virtual* /64 but they still have to use a /48 gateway. The idea would be that when a VPS is provisioned (more on this in a second), it'd contact our localized IPV6 routers and bind ::1/64 to its LAN facing side, and you'd have a proper /64 (it isn't autoconfigured but that's eh). Now, ideally I'd like to make it so all ::1's are bound to these V6 routers, but since there's probably a lot of users with ::1 IP's for their own things, that isn't an option (at least on old allocations).

Ultimately we'll stop using VENET all together and slowly move everyone to VETH just because it makes administration that much easier. The biggest issue is we'd have to port the scripts OpenVZ wrote to support address assignment easily.

All feedback is welcome 

Francisco


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