We’ve updated several things on our servers today:
- Ruby on Rails was updated from version 1.2.3 to 1.2.6. (If you use Rails on your site, our page explaining how to freeze Rails explains how you can get total control of Rails updates.)
- phpMyAdmin was updated from version 2.11.2.1 to 2.11.2.2.
- The WordPress software that runs this blog was updated to version 2.3.1. That doesn’t directly affect our customers — but if you’ve installed your own version of WordPress on your own site, this is a good reminder to update it: some older versions have security vulnerabilities. (We found that the update from 2.2.X to 2.3.1 was painless.)
We’ve installed several software upgrades on our servers. First of all, updates to our new Webmail system over the last few days fix:
- An incompatibility with Mac OS Internet Explorer version 5.1 and earlier.
- A problem that could cause an outgoing message to have an invalid “Reply-To” field in rare circumstances.
- A bug where messages in the Sent folder could appear out of order.
- An issue reported by one user that prevented viewing of a message with bad HTML code.
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:
- Ruby security updates (including libopenssl-ruby).
- Perl and PCRE security updates (this update was intentionally delayed due to the need for extra testing mentioned in the Debian PCRE announcement).
- MySQL client libraries that provide MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.1 backwards compatibility. (Updates to MySQL 5 are forthcoming but not yet ready.)
As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 22 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.
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail system is available. You’ll find many improved features:
- A flexible search feature that lets you search through subjects, senders, and more.
- The ability to optionally view “unsafe” images in HTML messages.
- Preferences that permanently remember things such as your time zone and date format.
- An easier-to-use address book.
- Optional threaded message display.
- Message filters (sorting incoming mail into certain folders) and highlighting.
- Automatic conversion of many foreign-language character sets to UTF-8 display, making it easier to read messages written in other languages.
- And much more…
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.
From 12:51 to 12:54 PM Pacific time today, one of our inbound mail servers (mx2.tigertech.net) incorrectly rejected some incoming mail that wouldn’t normally have been rejected, due to a configuration problem. This resulted in a small handful of messages being returned to the sender instead of properly delivered.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.)
A problem with the NFS automounter software on our main FTP server (which also serves our own www.tigertech.net Web site) caused us to restart that server at about 2:30 PM Pacific time. This caused a brief interruption in service for customers uploading files via FTP or using our control panel. (The problem didn’t directly affect any customer Web sites or e-mail service.)
Everything is now working normally. Again, we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this issue — this just hasn’t been our day.
As a result of an error on our part, a small handful of PHP 4 scripts on the “elzar” Web server may have displayed an error message or a blank page for up to 14 minutes today (from 12:48 to 1:02 PM Pacific time in the worst case). The problem has been resolved for any customers who were affected.
This happened because of a mistake we made in an upgrade to our sitewide PHP4/FastCGI configuration file, which our pre-upgrade testing failed to detect. We have added a new check to our automated testing system to ensure this cannot happen again.
We sincerely apologize to any customers affected by this problem.
