After upgrading our systems to PHP 5.2.6, we received reports of an incompatibility with Joomla. Some URLs do not work when Joomla is configured to use “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, but to not have “Use Apache mod_rewrite” turned on.
We’ve investigated this, and it’s caused by Joomla assuming that PHP has a bug that makes it work incorrectly, when in fact it’s supposed to work differently (and is clearly documented to work differently). Older versions of PHP had this bug, but the new version doesn’t.
To help our customers work around this, we’ve “patched” PHP to intentionally reintroduce the old bug for now, thus keeping it “compatible” with Joomla. If you were having trouble with Joomla’s “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, it should be fixed.
We’ll provide more technical details (and a more robust long-term solution) in the near future.
Update: We’ve also reported this problem to the Joomla developers and suggested a solution.
Due to software updates on our servers, Web hosting customers will experience about seven minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:
- Thursday, February 4 (servers beginning with the letter “L”, such as “lrrr”)
- Friday, February 5 (all other servers beginning with letters “F-Z”, such as “farnsworth”)
- Saturday, February 6 (servers beginning with letters “A-E”, such as “amy”)
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On Friday, a problem made our “My Account” control panel system unavailable for about three hours, and caused some other problems as well. We promised we’d follow up with more details.
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At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, January 16, the “amy” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “amy” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
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Starting at about 1:30 PM (Pacific time) today, some of our internal database systems had an unexpected failure. This lead to problems with our control panel (“My Account”), support site, and blog. Some customers may have also had problems with some aspects of Webmail (in particular, with the address book).
No customer data or Web sites were affected, and no e-mail was lost.
All systems are running again, so no one should see any problems — please let us know if you do! Some things are running on backup systems, so we’re working on finishing up the fixes and restoring everything to its normal status.
This was an unplanned and fairly horrible (and embarrassing) problem. This is the first time our own account management database has completely failed in the 10 years we’ve been providing Web hosting service. Obviously, we consider this sort of thing to be unacceptable, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.
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One of the features of our e-mail system is that we add SpamAssassin headers to incoming mail that isn’t whitelisted, as described on our SpamAssassin page.
A bug in the SpamAssassin software caused SpamAssassin scores to be incorrectly calculated for the first few days of this year: the scores were higher than they should have been.
We don’t use SpamAssassin scores as part of our spam filtering system, so this doesn’t affect most of our customers at all. However, some customers may have added custom rules to their mail programs that examine the SpamAssassin headers. If you do that, and you’ve directed high-scoring messages into a spam folder in your mail program that you don’t usually look at, you should look at all messages received between January 1 and the morning of January 6 to verify that they are actually spam.
Just so it’s clear, this bug affected everyone using SpamAssassin with any ISP or hosting company, not just our customers. That said, this bug unfortunately persisted on some of our servers for longer than it should have done, due to a technical issue with the way Debian Linux distributes SpamAssassin updates. We apologize for any problems this caused our customers; the problem was resolved on all servers early today.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Sunday January 3, all our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.
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Our own www.tigertech.net Web site and “My Account” control panel will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes beginning at 9 PM Pacific time tonight (December 2). We’ll be replacing and upgrading some hardware.
Customer Web sites and e-mail will not be affected at all.
Customers on the “amy” server experienced a nine minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 5:58 and 6:07 PM Pacific time today (November 16).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
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Our “bender” server encountered had an extremely high load starting at about 1:36 PM (Pacific time) today, and lasting until about 2:00 PM. Due to unusual circumstances, a runaway customer script caused the RAID disk array to become overloaded with writes, causing scripts that write to the disk to run slowly. The server may have seemed slow or unresponsive to customers at some point. We don’t consider this type of event to be acceptable, and apologize for the inconvenience.
We fixed the problem, and modified the server’s settings to hopefully prevent a recurrence. The changes were propagated to all similar hosting servers to protect them as well.
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