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.

Thanksgiving 2008 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 27 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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

Brief scheduled maintenance for elzar and farnsworth servers (completed)

At 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight (November 24), the “elzar” and “farnsworth” servers will be restarted. As a result, Web sites and e-mail service for customers using those servers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.

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Mom server temporarily unavailable (resolved)

The “mom” server experienced high load starting at around 10:45 AM (Pacific time) this morning. We restarted it just before 11:00, and it’s now working normally.

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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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No On California Proposition 8

As regular readers know, our blog is usually about the (often boring) technical details of Web hosting service. This post is different. We want to publicly state that our company is opposed to Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would take away marriage rights for some Californians.

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Brief power interruption for some servers (resolved)

This morning at 12:11 AM (Pacific time), one of the cabinets at our data center tripped a circuit breaker, causing all of the servers in that cabinet to lose power. Power was restored at 12:18 AM.

Customer Web sites and e-mail on the bender, calculon, lrrr, and zapp Web servers were unavailable during this 7 minute period. The ability to send and receive e-mail was also interrupted (no mail was lost, of course).

We are investigating the root cause of this problem to prevent it from happening again.

Easy Outlook 2007 setup using AutoDiscover

We are pleased to announce that we now support the AutoDiscover feature of Outlook 2007 to provide easy configuration of e-mail accounts. (We are the only e-mail provider that we know of who supports this feature!) When you need to configure an e-mail account within Outlook 2007, now you only need to enter your full name, e-mail address, and e-mail password. Outlook 2007 will then talk with our servers to get the rest of the settings needed to configure the e-mail account.

We have a support page available which walks you through setup using AutoDiscover.