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Rackspace to hit GLOBAL CLOUD REBOOT button to flush out Xen security nasty

Sysadmins warned of incoming blitz

Rackspace has warned its customers that it plans to reboot all of its servers across the globe to nix a security bug that was first spotted in the Xen virtualisation platform earlier this week.

The managed cloud outfit told its customers about the "maintenance work" in an email, seen by The Register, that was sent out early on Saturday morning.

"Recently, an issue that has the potential to impact a portion of the Public Cloud environment was reported," it said.

"Our engineers and developers continue to work closely with our vendors and partners to apply the solution to re-mediate this issue. While we believe in transparent communication, there are times when we must withhold certain details in order to protect you, our customers."

It comes after Amazon was forced to begin a gory global reboot instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) system, after the bug was first eye-balled.

Rackspace added in its email to customers today that it anticipated that all of its Standard, Performance 1, and Performance 2 Cloud Servers would need to be rebooted to flush out the bug.

"In preparation for these reboots, we recommend that you take proactive steps to ensure that your environment is configured to return to proper operations after a reboot," it said.

Customers were advised:

  • Verify all necessary services (Apache, IIS, MySQL, etc.) are configured to start on server boot
  • Ensure that you have up-to-date server images and file-level backups enabled, and confirm that you have backups of all critical data
  • Confirm that any unsaved changes, such as firewall rules and application configurations, are indeed saved

Rackspace added that it had a "tentative" schedule in place to hit reboot on its servers over the course of 48 hours between Sunday and Tuesday. The company said:

We will perform this maintenance one region at a time, and will not begin the maintenance for the next region until the maintenance for the previous region is complete. We will communicate with you via email and our status page at least one hour before the maintenance begins and immediately once the maintenance is completed, per region.

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