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.

Brief scheduled maintenance for calculon server (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight (October 18), the “calculon” Web server will be restarted. As a result, Web sites and e-mail service for customers using that server will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.

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Calculon server temporarily unavailable (resolved)

The “calculon” Web server was unavailable between approximately 5:00 and 5:08 Pacific time this afternoon. This resulted in an interruption of service for Web sites on that server. (Some e-mail activity was delayed, but no e-mail was lost.)

We sincerely apologize for this problem! We consider this type of failure to be unacceptable, and are looking into the cause of the problem so that we can take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening again.

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.

Mail with blank contents for some customers (resolved)

Due to a problem with our spam filtering system, some customers received blank incoming messages between 11:35 and 11:53 AM (Pacific time) this morning.

A non-blank copy of these messages was also properly delivered (although with a delay), so no mail is missing.

We have permanently fixed the underlying cause of the problem, and we apologize for the concern and annoyance this caused.

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.

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 20 (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (September 20), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.

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 three minutes “downtime” per server.