GigaTux News

Following the recent announcement from the Turnkey Linux team detailing the availability of new Ubuntu-based appliances, GigaTux have prepared these appliances for use on their Virtual Private Server packages. Automatic installs and reinstalls of any Turnkey Operating System, including all 25 new appliances, can be performed through the GigaTux DTC web interface, and basic support is provided.

The new appliances enable users to easily deploy primarily web-based applications within an entire Linux kernel and Ubuntu-based package set. Once a distribution is chosen within the control panel, the install is fully completed within a few minutes and ready to be customised. This enables a rapid deployment of a tested setup, with full update and security support provided by the Turnkey Linux and Ubuntu package maintainers.

The following new Turnkey Linux appliances are immediately available for automatic install:

• Turnkey Linux Bugzilla
• Turnkey Linux Deki
• Turnkey Linux DokuWiki
• Turnkey Linux Domain Controller
• Turnkey Linux Amazon EC2 SDK Appliance
• Turnkey Linux ejabberd
• Turnkey Linux File Server
• Turnkey Linux Gallery
• Turnkey Linux Google App Engine SDK
• Turnkey Linux Mantis
• Turnkey Linux MoinMoin
• Turnkey Linux Moodle
• Turnkey Linux MoveableType
• Turnkey Linux Open Bravo
• Turnkey Linux OTRS
• Turnkey Linux phpBB
• Turnkey Linux ProjectPier
• Turnkey Linux Redmine
• Turnkey Linux Revision Control
• Turnkey Linux Roundup
• Turnkey Linux Symfony
• Turnkey Linux Torrent Server
• Turnkey Linux Trac
• Turnkey Linux Tracks (Getting Things Done)
• Turnkey Linux TWiki
• Turnkey Linux Zimbra

Please see the full press release for further information.

GigaTux is proud to launch its own URL shortening service that can be used by all users for any purpose. The idea behind these is that you convert a long URL, e.g. https://www.gigatux.com/distro.php?distro=turnkey into a short version like http://ho.io/g which will automatically take you to the original URL.

As we're primarily a hosting company, we have the advantage that this service does not significantly drain our resources, so can commit to it being available pretty much as long as the Internet is around!

GigaTux has been running a tor server on one of its reliable VPS products for quite some time now, using unused bandwidth on the GigaTux servers to support anonymised Internet traffic.

We are happy to announce that we have now contributed 15 terabytes of bandwidth from the primary GigaTux tor node. Our node name is imaginatively called 'gigatux'.

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. See the Ultimate Guide to Tor page for examples of typical Tor users. See the overview page for a more detailed explanation of what Tor does, and why this diversity of users is important.

All servers hosted by GigaTux have been successfully moved to a new colocation facility at Spectrum House in Maidenhead. The servers were shut down gracefully and moved within the 2 hour windows as previously detailed. This ends the stretch of high uptime totalling 154 days on this server, although there is no reason this cannot be repeated and exceeded.

Because of a configuration change, a previous issue with the Xen setup means that each VPS can now be shut down and rebooted without needing to 'kill' the VPS after the shutdown sequence has completed.

GigaTux has now revamped its news system, with news now being produced as a blog. This means that users can subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds, as can be seen on the left panel of the news page. This allows us to keep our users, and the community at large, automatically informed of new developments.

News posts are also written automatically to our twitter feed, so feel free to follow us.