GigaTux News

GigaTux is proud to announce the immediate availability of a new Linux distribution, Mageia 2, on its VPS Linux hosting platform.

GigaTux is the first VPS provider to offer Mageia 2 for automatic installs on any VPS system and this has been confirmed as running in a very stable manner on GigaTux's Xen platform. Deployments are automatically performed using the DTC control panel interface, which GigaTux have patched to enable support for Mageia.

Mageia 2 was released on 22nd May 2012 and is the second stable release of the community distribution that was originally forked from Mandriva Linux. The Mageia organisation is completely community-driven with no commercial oversight dictating its future. As a fork of Mandriva, a long-standing distribution with a huge community of users, every feature expected of a Linux distribution is available. Originally, Mageia was forked because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Mandriva distribution, but now it has grown into its own solid distribution in this second release.

Mageia 2 is immediately available for deployment on GigaTux's servers in the UK (London), USA (San Jose and Chicago) and Germany (Frankfurt). All servers run on Xen with hard disks in a RAID-10 configuration and two Intel Xeon CPUs each.

To sign up, visit GigaTux's Linux VPS pages

GigaTux is proud to announce that 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) is now available for instant install on any of our VPS solutions. This means that users can install the latest Ubuntu version with one click. This functionality is instantly available on any of our servers in the UK, US or Germany.

If any other users of the DTC control panel which to use the work we have done to get this to work, contact us at [email protected] and we will be glad to help.

GigaTux has just completed a major refresh of all Linux distributions it offers for automatic reinstall on its Xen VPS platform. Not only have we updated most distributions to the latest versions available, but we have also added two fully new distributions.

The distributions that have been fully added to work with our control panel, under a paravirtualised kernel, are:

• Arch Linux 2010.05
• Linux Mint 10

The distributions that have been refreshed and tested in this release are:

• Fedora Core 14
• Gentoo (snapshot from 2001-03-03)
• Mandriva 2010.2
• OpenSuSE 11.4
• Ubuntu 10.10
• Ubuntu 10.04
• The entire Turnkey Linux 11.1 suite, including new appliances for Magento, OpenBravo, Prestashop and VTiger. This is available for all DTC users at our Debian repository.

GigaTux has not yet packaged its non-Turnkey Linux distributions to go in its DTC Xen image repository, but users of the DTC control panel are welcome to contact [email protected] to request a copy of any distribution.

All of the above distributions are available for a one-click install on any VPS, which will configure a base system and set up networking and passwords automatically.

London, 9th February 2011. GigaTux is proud to announce that it is immediately accepting orders for Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on its two newest servers in San Jose, California and Frankfurt, Germany. This is combined with GigaTux's two existing servers located in London, UK. Both servers have been tested to work with native dual stack IPv4 / IPv6 as provided by the underlying datacentres.

GigaTux's new server based in the USA is GigaTux's most powerful yet, with 48GB DDR3 ECC RAM, four 1.5TB hard disks, two 2.5" SSDs, 2 Intel Xeon E5520 processors and on-board IPMI with hardware watchdog. Because of the networking arrangements with our colocation provider, we are offering 2.5 times the data transfer on this server compared with our other servers.

This server is located at Hurricane Electric's Fremont 2 datacentre around San Jose and sits on the powerful Hurricane Electric backbone, which is entirely IPv6 capable and has direct links to Tokyo, West, Central and East USA and is only one further POP hop away from Europe via London and Amsterdam. The Hurricane Electric backbone network features the following:

• Multiple 10Gbps (OC-192 / STM-64) connections on every core router.
• Over 6000 BGP sessions with over 1600 different networks.
• Multiple redundant paths in the US, US-Europe and Asia.
• Self-owned DWDM backbone circuits.

GigaTux's new server based in Germany is a less powerful 8GB, quad core server, but will host fewer VPSs and will thus maintain a similar speed for users as the USA server. Regardless of the capabilities of the server, GigaTux proactively monitors performance on each server to ensure an impressive user experience.

This server is located at the velia.net's Solmsstr datacentre in Frankfurt, Germany. This network is also entirely IPv6 capable with excellent European connectivity. The Frankfurt backbone network features the following:

• 20GBit/s peering to DE-CIX.
• A combined total of 24Gbps upstream connectivity to TeilaSonera, Global Crossing and Kleyrex.
• Intrametro Access ring around Frankfurt.

Both servers (as of February 2010) have free capacity to immediately host multiple VPS nodes and GigaTux has the resources to expand if necessary. Download test and ping IP addresses are available on request.

To sign up, visit our VPS signup pages.

We're taking part in World IPv6 Day on 8th June 2011, a worldwide event that will see many Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies offer their services over IPv6 for a 24-hour period. We are going be joining them, and will ensure that where possible, our services are available over IPv6. We aim to keep this available assuming it causes no issues.

At present, we offer the following over IPv6:

• VPS connectivity to users in the US and Germany (a native /64 is provided)
• Nameservers (tunneled - ns1, ns2 and ns3.gigatux.com)
• Mail exchange (tunneled - mail.gigatux.com)

From 8th June, we hope to offer the following over IPv6:

• Primary website (tunelled)
• VPS control panel (tunelled)

Ideally, we will be providing these services using native IPv6, but our hosting provider in the UK does not yet support this. However, if they start offering this, we will change to a native IPv6 system and also ensure that VPS users in the UK have access to native IPv6 connectivity.

Here's to the future of the Internet!