When Hacker News picked up Part 1 of our series of blog posts on running public NTP servers, a contributor said, “I wish he’d explained … what they ultimately did (since there’s no part 3 that I can find).” We had dropped the ball — we had never concluded the series, had never written part 3, had never described the strategies to mitigate the data transfer costs. This blog post remedies that oversight; it consists of two parts: the first part addresses strategies to reduce the cost of running an NTP server, and the second part discusses side topics (aspects of running an NTP server). ...

This blog post describes the procedure we followed to use the beta BOSH command line interface (CLI) to deploy an nginx webserver with a native IPv6 address (i.e. 2600:1f16:0a62:5c00::4) to AWS in addition to its IPv4 Elastic IP address (i.e. 52.15.73.90). We were then able to browse the webserver via the IPv6 protocol. BOSH does not support IPv6. This is a proof-of-concept. Do not apply IPv6 to your production BOSH Directors or to BOSH CLI-deployed systems. ...

VMWare NSX is a network virtualization platform (frequently paired with the vSphere IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)). It includes features such as Load Balancers (LBs) and firewall rules, features often found in public-facing IaaSes (e.g. AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCE (Google Compute Engine), and Microsoft Azure) but not native to vSphere. BOSH, a VM orchestrator, includes hooks to interoperate with NSX’s LB and Distributed Firewall features. These hooks enable BOSH to attach created VMs to existing NSX Load Balancer Pools and NSX Distributed Firewall rulesets. BOSH uses NSX’s Security Groups [NSX Security Groups] as the underlying mechanism. ...

In this blog post, we describe the procedure we followed in order to create a custom Google Compute Engine (GCE) stemcell with a user cunnie whose ~/.ssh/authorized_keys is pre-populated with a specific public key. Customizing stemcells is highly discouraged — it voids your warranty, and opens a host of problems which will only cause pain. This post is intended as an educational demonstration of the stemcell building process. You have been warned. ...

When PowerDNS released version 4.0.1 of their authoritative nameserver, we rushed to update our BOSH Release (which was at version 4.0.0). We thought it would be a walk in the park, but instead it was an epic fail (a final release which couldn’t be deployed because the blobs were broken). In this blog post we describe the procedure we ultimately followed to successfully create an updated BOSH final release of version 4.0.1 of the PowerDNS authoritative nameserver, highlighting some of the tricky and non-obvious steps. ...