Our servers are not vulnerable to the bug in “bash”

We’ve had a couple of people ask if our servers are vulnerable to the recent security bug in the bash shell, also known as the “shellshock” bug.

The answer is no. All copies of bash on all our servers were updated to a fixed (patched) version yesterday, within an hour of the news becoming public.

Update September 25, 2:58 PM: We’ve also applied a later, stronger version of the fix today. This will soon be announced as Debian Security Advisory DSA-3035-1 .

Upcoming Debian “wheezy” software upgrades

Update October 14: This process described below is complete. All the updates were installed, and we’re now using only Debian wheezy on all servers.

Over the last year, we’ve been slowly upgrading our servers from Debian Linux version 6 (codename “squeeze”) to version 7 (codename “wheezy”).

All the “prominent” software (such as the Apache Web server, MySQL, PHP, the Linux kernel, and so on) was updated months ago, one piece at a time, usually with individual announcements here on our blog. Any software with security or compatibility issues has also already been upgraded.

What’s left at the end of that process are many “minor” packages, each probably used by less than 1% of our customers. We’ll be upgrading the rest of these over the next 30 days.

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WordPress 4.0

WordPress 4.0 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

We strongly recommend keeping your WordPress installation up to date (and using unguessable passwords)! You should first update the active theme and plugins, then delete all inactive themes and plugins, and then update the core WordPress files.