Hello okeanos users,

Many of you have already noticed that the beta version of ~okeanos manages your IPs in a new way. Our previous blog post explains what are the new features. We will provide some excerpts of this blog post below:

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Public IPs

Next to your 'machines' and 'networks' two new tabs just appeared. The first one reads 'public IPs'. Until now, every machine that you created got connected to the public network (Internet) and was automatically assigned a public IPv4 by the ~okeanos infrastructure. Although this was sufficient for most of you, our advanced users asked for even greater flexibility. So, we introduce Public IPs for everybody:

Public IPs are a new ~okeanos resource and you own them.

This means that now you have the power to decide which IPv4 goes to which one of your machines. You can create new IPs, destroy them, attach them and detach them to/from machines, whenever you wish. Since Public IPs are your new resource, you are able to track their usage under your Dashboard -> Usage tab, as happens with all your other resources. Finally, you now have the choice to create machines without IPv4 connectivity at all and connect them only to Private Networks.

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Hot-plugging

A major change in ~okeanos internals now allows you to connect/disconnect machines to/from networks and attach/detach public IPs on-the-fly, without the need for a machine reboot, as happened until now. All changes will take effect instantly with new NICs appearing automagically inside your machines after a successful action. Connect and you're on!
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In short, every VM you own has a public IPv6 address and optionally, one or more public IPv4 addresses called "floating IPs". Each of your IPs (IPv4 or IPv6) is assigned to one network adapter (1-to-1 relationship). The provision of on-demand IP addresses to a VM is possible with the hotplugging of a network adapter. The VM then can use a utility such as Network Manager to obtain the IP that is reserved by Cyclades.

The above is not an easy task by all means and it requires an OS that can orchestrate this procedure. The latest versions of ~okeanos Images should always be up-to-date to handle this task however, the same is not guarranteed for their previous versions.

NOTE: If you have created a VM that suffers from connectivity issues, we suggest you read the following FAQ (1, 2, 3) as you may need to update them in order to operate properly.

Ho, ho, ho,
Santa Claus (and the ~okeanos team as well...)