The PHP scripting language offers an SNMP extension “for managing remote devices via the Simple Network Management Protocol”.
It’s unlikely that any of our customers use this extension, but if you do, it may no longer work correctly on very old PHP versions before PHP 5.6. (The reason is technical, and involves forthcoming updates to the SNMP library on our servers.)
As of today, we’re officially no longer supporting the very old Ruby 1.8, Python 2.5 and Python 2.6 programs on our servers. They’ll soon be removed from our servers entirely. (Ruby and Python are scripting languages; if you don’t know what they are, your site is unlikely to affected by this and you can ignore it.)
Our MySQL database servers now support the innodb_large_prefix option and the “Barracuda” innodb_file_format option.
Users should not notice any difference, but this should improve compatibility with a small number of scripts that require these options (notably recent versions of Moodle).
We’ve updated the AWStats software we use to generate website statistics. The statistics beginning today use the latest version 7.7, which fixes several bugs. Customers should not notice any other changes.
We should probably mention that if you’re relying on AWStats for information about the behavior of human visitors, you can usually get more accurate statistics using Google Analytics, which works in a different way than simply analyzing log data after the fact. We have a page explaining more about the difference between AWStats and Google Analytics.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, January 8, 2018, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for each site at some point during this period.
The PHP developers recently released version 5.6.33 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
This change should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.27 and 7.1.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
