Today we are pleased to announce NodeBalancer concurrent connections have been increased to 10,000, with no change in price.  All existing NodeBalancers have already been seamlessly upgraded, and all new NodeBalacers will get the new limit.

NodeBalancer pricing:

If you’d like to know more about how NodeBalancers can help you:

• NodeBalancer Product Page
• NodeBalancer Howto
• NodeBalancer Reference Guide
• NodeBalancer API

Enjoy!

-Chris

There is currently an outstanding bug in the Upstart package that may cause startup job logging to fail during boot, printing errors on your Lish console. Upstart assumes “/dev/pts” will be made available via an initrd before it runs, which doesn’t happen in our (and other) environments. Job logging being disabled during boot should not cause any issues. There is an open bug on Launchpad where you can find a more in-depth explanation about the issue, as well as be notified when a fix has been released.

Enjoy!

-Tim

• CentOS 6.2 (release notes)
• Fedora 16 (release notes)
• openSUSE 12.1 (release notes)

In addition to providing these new distributions for deployment, we’ve updated our 32-bit and 64-bit Gentoo images to provide more up-to-date packages at the time of provisioning.

If you would like to deploy one of these distributions, you can follow our documentation in the Linode Library for deploying a Linux distribution.

-Tim

The re-authentication is meant to protect your contact settings, password changes, and other preferences.  The re-auth lasts for about 10 minutes, after which you’ll be asked to provide your password again on those sections of the Linode Manager.

If you re-auth on your My Profile you will find two new features:

The Linode Events RSS Feed allows you to subscribe to a stream of the activity occurring under your account.  Currently only Linode jobs are streamed, but we plan on adding more event types.  The RSS URL itself does not require Linode Manager authentication – meaning, copy and paste the URL into your favorite reader and you’re done.

The other feature is Linode Events email notification – which is the same stream of events aggregated over some time (currently every 15 minutes) but emailed directly to you.  We have defaulted this to ENABLED for all existing and any new users.

Enjoy!
-Chris

These protections increase the time it would take for a successful brute force by a couple aeons, and significantly impede dictionary attacks.

This solution is preferred over locking accounts, since that’s annoying and someone else could get your account locked by making a bunch of failed log in attempts using your username.  Our solution still lets legitimate users make attempts – albeit a little slower than usual.

-Chris

Previously, if you needed the ability for others to transfer your zone from our authoritative nameservers, you could only enable it for everyone.  Now you can specify ‘any’, or a list of IPv4/IPv6 IPs and AXFRs will be limited to only those IPs.

And for slave zones, you can now specify IPv6 masters.

Enjoy!
-Chris

A common problem when implementing API bindings or tools is that one ends up duplicating the same classes, methods, properties, type validations, and error handling – which is tedious and error prone, and doesn’t receive new API methods or parameters without the code changes.

By making the API specification available in machine readable format, tools can be written to retrieve the structure and dynamically implement the API from the structure’s contents.  No hard coding of methods.  No hard coding of params.  No bitrot.

http://www.linode.com/api/utility/api.spec

The call does not require authorization.

Enjoy!
-Chris

POSSCON – March 28-29

This week we’re at POSSCON in Columbia, SC. The conference’s aim is to provide affordable access to quality open source education in the southeast U.S. Our very own Matt Cone will be giving a talk about his journey from customer to employee. Find him on the “Demo/Products & Services” track at 2:30PM on Thursday.

We hope to see you at booth #16 to meet the crew and score some swag!

Earlier this month, we also attended the following events:

PyCon – March 9-11

Santa Clara, CA – The largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language.

SXSW – March 12-15

Austin, TX – Five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology and scores of exciting networking events showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.

DrupalCon – March 19-23

Denver, CO – The official conference of the Drupal community geared towards all levels of Drupal users. The theme for this year centered around “Collaborative Publishing for Every Device”.

We have plenty of conferences lined up for this season — stay tuned for more conference announcements!

If you’d like to enable IPv6 for your existing Linode, just navigate to the Remote Access tab of the Linode Manager and click the “Enable IPv6″ link. Once you reboot, your Linode will have a native IPv6 address ready to use. New Linodes and Linodes migrating between locations will automatically be IPv6-enabled.

Alternatively, NodeBalancers can be used as an IPv6 endpoint without you needing to actually enable IPv6 on your backend Linodes.

More information can be found on our IPv6 FAQ page.

We are also beginning limited trials of large IPv6 allocations routed to Linodes. If you’d like to take part in the trial please open a ticket and we’ll do our best to accommodate your needs.

Enjoy!