Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, July 4 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Update June 13, 2018: This is complete, and HTTP/2 is now used on all websites we host.
We’ve updated the Apache web server software we use from version 2.4.25 to 2.4.33, which allows us to add support for the newer HTTP/2 protocol.
HTTP/2 is enabled for our own tigertech.net sites and a small number of our customer sites now, and we’ll be gradually rolling out this feature to all sites over the next few weeks. (We’ll update this post when that’s completely finished.)
Customers should not see any problems or downtime. We’re mentioning it here just so that customers who do notice a change for some reason will know about it. As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
Between 5:58 and 6:04 AM Pacific time today (June 1, 2018), the “web04” server experienced a partial outage that led to some sites being unavailable or slow to respond.
The problem has now been resolved, and other servers were not affected. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 28 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Update May 22, 2018: The change described below is complete on all servers.
Over the next few days, we’ll be updating the software used on each web server from Apache version 2.4.10 to 2.4.25.
Customers should not notice any changes or downtime. We’re mentioning it here just so that customers who do notice a change for some reason will know about it.
This is part of a series of software upgrades to allow us to add support for the newer HTTP/2 protocol on all sites in the near future.
As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
A couple of customers have recently contacted us about problems with Outlook 2011 for Mac when it’s configured to make SSL connections.
Outlook 2011 for Mac has a bug: It tries to use the long-obsolete “SSLv2” protocol that is no longer supported on modern mail servers, including ours. If your network also uses a very common kind of firewall that prevents “client-initiated SSL/TLS session renegotiation”, SSL connections will simply fail.
The best solution to this is to upgrade to a modern version of Outlook. Outlook 2016 for Mac, for example, doesn’t have this problem.
Although we haven’t offered the long-obsolete PHP 5.5 (and earlier) series to new customers for some time, some customers who signed up long ago are still using this version (or even earlier versions), despite our nagging you to upgrade 
For those customers still using PHP 5.5 or earlier despite the nagging, this is just a quick note that we’ve “rebuilt” older versions of PHP for technical reasons to allow them to keep running on our systems. They now use slightly newer versions of various libraries, including libxml, FreeType, ImageMagick, MySQL, and OpenSSL, and they no longer support some old obsolete libraries, such as T1Lib. The rebuilt version will be deployed on all our servers within the next few hours.
These changes should not be noticeable. In the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.36, 7.0.30, 7.1.17, and 7.2.5 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
Update May 3, 2018: The change described below is complete on all servers.
Over the next few days, we’ll be updating the software used on each web server from the Apache 2.2 series to the 2.4 series.
Customers should not notice any changes or downtime. We’re mentioning it here just so that customers who do notice a change for some reason will know about it.
While the Apache 2.4 series has some changes and new features, we’ve intentionally kept things compatible with older versions. In particular, we’re using mod_access_compat to ensure that existing “Allow / Deny” authorization directives work, and we’re using SSILegacyExprParser on to ensure that existing Server Side Includes work.
The Apache 2.4 series brings changes we’re using to improve our customers’ websites. For example, we’re already using OCSP stapling to speed up the initial connection to SSL sites in many browsers, and in the future we’ll be adding support for the newer HTTP/2 protocol. Neither of these were possible with older versions of Apache.
As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The authors of the Drupal CMS software today announced yet another “highly critical” Drupal security bug (SA-CORE-2018-004).
This vulnerability is likely to be widely exploited soon. If you use Drupal 7 or 8 without updating it, your site will be compromised (taken over by “hackers”).
To protect our customers who have installed Drupal, we have “patched” the vulnerable files on every copy of Drupal on our servers, blocking the attacks that we expect to see in the future. We used these patches:
So our customers are protected against this particular problem. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t upgrade Drupal: older versions also have other security bugs. If you’ve installed the Drupal software on your site, please make absolutely sure you’ve upgraded to the latest version today.
