Perl and Ruby updated

We’ve updated our servers with a Perl security bug fix and a Ruby security update.

The updates fix only security bugs, and customers should not notice any changes in how the Perl or Ruby programming languages work.

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, December 6 (completed)

Between 10:30 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (December 6), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for about five minutes at some point during this period.

No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.

This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Update: the maintenance was completed with less than five minutes of downtime.

Perl security update applied

We’ve updated the Perl programming language on our servers with a security update.

The update only fixes one security bug, and customers should not notice any changes in how Perl works.

E-mail now supports reject and allow lists

We’ve enhanced our e-mail service with support for manual “reject” and “allow” lists.

The reject list lets you add individual e-mail addresses, entire domains or IP addresses from which incoming e-mail should always be rejected. The allow list lets you add senders from which e-mail should always be accepted.

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Apache and MySQL updated

We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server and MySQL database server software to cover recent minor security updates. Customers should not notice any changes.

Mail improvements

In the past few months, we’ve made a couple of behind-the-scenes improvements to our mail systems that have improved reliability for our customers.

• Redundant outgoing mail delivery
• Automatic accepting of replies

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PHP 5 updated

We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5.

Rsync 3 available

We’ve updated rsync to version 3 on our servers. (We’re using Debian version 3.0.3-2, which includes patches from rsync 3.0.4.)

Rsync 3 is significantly faster than previous versions for recursive file transfers (which we use in our backup system). However, the new version is backward compatible with rsync 2.x, so users shouldn’t notice any changes or problems, even if you haven’t updated your own copy of rsync.

Tip for users of Rails 1.1.6 and earlier

If you have a Ruby on Rails application that originally used Rails 1.1.6 or earlier, you might have trouble after yesterday’s Rails update (which also updated several other Ruby “gems”, including the “RubyGems” gem itself).

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Ruby on Rails updated to version 2.1.1

We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.1.

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