Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 5 to observe the US Labor Day 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 Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.
The authors of the Mailman mailing list software we provide for customers have recently released version 2.1.23 to fix several bugs.
We’ve upgraded the Mailman software on our servers as a result.
Users of Mailman lists shouldn’t notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or see any problems.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.10 and 5.6.25 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, August 12, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.49 to 5.5.50. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 10:43 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
One of the features of our hosting plans is the ability for technically advanced customers to use the Unix (Linux) command-line shell.
Until now, there have been two ways to connect to the shell: you could use telnet, or use SSH (which stands for “secure shell”).
The older telnet method dates to 1969 (that’s not a typo) and is not secure: it sends your account password without any encryption, allowing it to be seen by eavesdroppers on your local network (such as other people in a Wi-Fi cafe).
SSH, as you can guess from the “secure” in its name, fixes this — and more: Anything you can do with telnet, you can do with SSH.
Telnet should never be used anymore. Everyone should always use SSH. We have a page explaining how to use SSH with your site.
Our logs show that almost all of our customers are already using SSH instead of telnet. Because of that, and because there are several ongoing “denial of service” attacks involving telnet, we’re disabling telnet as a shell connection method to increase the security of our servers. Please use SSH instead.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Between 9:50 PM Pacific time August 9, and 10:49 AM Pacific time August 10 (today), a third-party virus scanner we use incorrectly marked some Microsoft Word attachments as being a virus called “Win.Exploit.CVE_2016_3316-1” and returned them to the sender. This affected several of our customers.
We’ve “whitelisted” this virus pattern to prevent this from happening. However, our logs show that many other ISPs are still incorrectly rejecting this “virus pattern”, so you may still see some rejections if you send Word attachments outside our network until the other ISPs also fix it.
We apologize for the inconvenience this caused any of our customers.
Between 8:52 and 9:03 AM Pacific time today (August 10, 2016), some sites we host experienced an interruption of service. The problem is resolved, and will not recur.
