Ruby on Rails updated to version 1.2.3

We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 1.2.3.

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A defense against some MySQL connection problems

A couple of times in the last week, we’ve seen one of our MySQL database servers have an unusually high number of connections. That’s a serious issue: If there are too many connections to a MySQL server, customer scripts won’t be able to connect to a database, so we’ve spent some time looking at the cause and fixing it.

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Mailman monthly password reminders: not recommended

One of the features of our service is the industrial-strength Mailman mailing list manager. Mailman is a very good program in some ways (it’s built like a tank and reliably handles very large volumes of list mail, and it removes much of the drudgery of managing large lists), but it has a couple of undesirable “features”.

The most obvious is that the interface is terribly ugly (the Mailman developers are working on a big improvement to this, thankfully; just so it’s clear, we didn’t create the program, and we’re as horrified by the circa-1996 appearance as everyone else). Another problem with the program, though, is the option for “monthly password reminders”. This is a design flaw that’s being removed from Mailman, and although most of the lists on our servers don’t use password reminders, customers who do should probably turn them off now in preparation for that change.

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Brief scheduled maintenance (May 30)

The “farnsworth” Web server locked up and needed restarting again last night at about 9:04 PM Pacific time, causing another short outage for some customers. (A similar problem happened Monday night.) To make sure this doesn’t happen again, we’ll be replacing the entire server (switching it with a spare server) at about 11 PM (Pacific) tonight, which will result in about 5 minutes of downtime.

We’re also taking this opportunity to upgrade the hardware on one of our mail servers to allow for future growth; customers (even those with accounts on other Web servers besides the farnsworth server) may see a short (approximately 5 minute) interruption in their ability to retrieve e-mail between 11 PM and midnight.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes — as always, we’re committed to the highest possible levels of reliability.

Which server is my account on?

Some of the posts on our blog mention specific servers. You’ll occasionally see things like “The web14 server will be rebooted at 11 PM”, “mail sent from the web01 server was delayed”, or “more memory has been added to the web10 server”. Your question, quite naturally, is “How do I know if they’re talking about the server that has my account?”

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Web server outage for some customers

One of our Web servers (the “farnsworth” server) stopped responding at 7:07 PM Pacific time today, and needed to be forcibly restarted. This resulted in a Web server and FTP server outage of about 15 minutes for some customers, although most sites were unaffected.

After being restarted, the server is responding properly, but still showing a problem with one of the disks in its RAID array. Because of that, we plan to replace the disk to prevent future problems, meaning we’ll restart that server again later tonight (after 11 PM Pacific time).

We apologize to all customers affected; we strive hard to avoid this kind of problem.

Memorial Day holiday hours

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 May 29, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

PHP 5 Upgraded for Security

We’ve updated PHP 5 on our servers to cover sixteen recently identified security issues. This only affects customers who have chosen to use PHP 5 — but since this upgrade only fixes security bugs, even those customers shouldn’t notice any changes.

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Packet loss to some destinations (resolved)

We’re currently seeing about 15% “packet loss” from our data center to a handful of locations on the Internet (notably connections that go through the above.net backbone). Most people aren’t affected by this, but for those that are, this can cause connections to be slower than normal. We have a ticket open with the data center for this issue, and we’ll update this page when it’s resolved.

Update May 20: The packet loss problem was effectively resolved on Friday, although we’ve been monitoring the above.net backbone connection closely to ensure that there is no ongoing problem. Although we’ve seen a couple of short latency issues that we’re still following up with the data center about, customers are not experiencing any problems.

Advantages of e-mail mailboxes over forwarding addresses

One of the features of our e-mail service is the ability to create e-mail forwarding aliases to forward messages from an address at your new Web site to existing e-mail account (AOL, Hotmail etc…). This is a useful feature if you need to receive e-mail from your new Web site and need to get it going quickly.

However, in the long term it’s better to use mailboxes on our servers (referred to as “POP mailboxes” on our setup screens, although they can also be accessed by IMAP or Webmail). In fact, one of the biggest advantages of having your own Web site and domain name is that you own it and all of its e-mail addresses. From our experience this is much better than being at the whim of a company that’s almost impossible to contact if you have trouble.

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