Here’s an obscure thing we spent some time on today that doesn’t affect our customers, but might be useful to someone else searching the Internet. The problem was a MySQL database table that, as far as we can tell, worked perfectly… except that it shows this message when we run CHECK TABLE:
Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `users`" to fix it!
We applied a MySQL security update tonight. The version number remains 5.0.32, and customers should not notice any changes; the update just fixes several security issues.
The update was performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that MySQL was unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero MySQL downtime.
We’ve updated several things on our servers today:
We’ve installed several software upgrades on our servers. First of all, updates to our new Webmail system over the last few days fix:
These fixes solve all the bugs that we know of in the new Webmail system (although we have plenty of feature requests that we’re working on). If you’re still using the old system, now’s the time to switch, or to let us know why you’re using the old system so we can address that.
In addition, we also upgraded the following software on our servers Monday night:
As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail system is available. You’ll find many improved features:
If you’re already a Webmail user, you’ll see the new pages the next time you login. If you haven’t tried Webmail before, this page explains how to get started.
By the way, we’ll be keeping our old Webmail system around for a couple of weeks at this special address, just in case anyone experiences any problems and needs to temporarily “downgrade”. If you have any trouble with the new system, do let us know right away so we can address it before the old pages are permanently removed.
We’d also like to thank the more-than-200 people who helped us test the new system over the last few weeks. The new system is better because of your efforts.
We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.11.2. (In case you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin, it’s a Web-based system for managing MySQL databases without requiring you to use the command line; you can find more details on the phpMyAdmin home page.)
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail pages are available for public “beta testing”. The new Webmail system is a modified version of the popular SquirrelMail software, which has many features the older system lacks.
In response to customer suggestions, we’ve changed the appearance of Mailman invitation/address verification messages a little. Most notably, the messages now include your domain name in the subject, which should make it easier for people to recognize who you are and why you’re sending them the message.
You can see a sample on our page describing Mailman invitation messages.
In an earlier post, we talked about how we use a monitoring system that forwards test e-mail to other large ISPs, then checks to make sure the message was promptly delivered.
We already check delivery to AOL, Comcast, GMail and Verizon, and we’ve now added AT&T/SBCGlobal and Yahoo mail. We’ll continue to expand it in the future.
An extensive monitoring and alert system is at the heart of our reliability, really; it’s what allows us to know that things are working properly. We can guarantee that if our customers send mail to those ISPs right now, it’s being delivered. That’s something few other companies even bother to check.
We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.11.0. (In case you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin, it’s a Web-based system for managing MySQL databases without requiring you to use the command line; you can find more details on the phpMyAdmin home page.)
