World IPv6 Day is now in progress (it started at midnight UTC, which was 5:00 PM Pacific time). For the next 24 hours, many sites on the Internet, including our own www.tigertech.net, are fully IPv6-enabled.
If you have trouble connecting to www.tigertech.net, check other sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you have problems with any of those, you should test your IPv6 connection and notify your ISP or network administrator about any problems.
For more information about IPv6 (and how sites hosted with us can participate), see our previous post: Now We Are Six: IPv6 support.
Today we detected that one of our customers had installed a WordPress plugin on his blog that did something malicious: when the plugin was activated, it sent a stranger an e-mail message allowing full administrator access to the blog.
How did this happen? Well, our customer simply searched the WordPress plugin directory for “Contact Form”, saw the popular “Contact Form 7” plugin listed, then clicked “Install Now”. That all sounds reasonable.
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We’re pleased to announce optional IPv6 support for Web sites hosted with our company (just in time for World IPv6 day next week!).
Most customers shouldn’t use IPv6 yet, and if you don’t know what it is, you can safely ignore this post. But if you’re familiar with IPv6 and interested in adding it to your site, this post explains what you need to know.
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All Web sites on the “farnsworth” Web server have been moved to a new server named “zapp”.
This change was made for reliability; our monitoring systems detected potential hardware problems with the “farnsworth” server earlier today, and the sites were moved so it can be replaced before it causes any problems.
This doesn’t cause any downtime, and customers shouldn’t notice any change — but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight, May 14, the “pazuzu” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “pazuzu” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
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A router failure at an upstream Internet “peer” that we connect to caused high packet loss for some Internet connections between 5:18 PM and 5:28 PM Pacific time.
The packet loss grew worse through that period until it exceeded 25%, which is enough to cause pages to fail to load within a browser’s timeout period if your connection was one of the affected ones. (Connections that go through different routers were not affected.)
Network engineers have routed all connections around the failed hardware until it’s replaced, so the problem is resolved. If your part of the Internet was one of the affected ones, please accept our apologies for the problem.
May 6, 4:43 AM Pacific time: An outage at our primary data center caused a complete service interruption for all customers.
Update 5:08 AM: All services have been restored and are working normally.
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The “fry” and “bender” Web servers will be restarted between 11:00 and 11:15 PM Pacific time tonight (Friday, April 29, 2011). This will cause a five-minute interruption of Web and e-mail service for customers on those servers.
Other servers will not be affected, and incoming mail will only be delayed, not lost.
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8:52 PM Pacific time: We’re investigating a problem with the “fry” hosting server that’s requiring us to restart it; further details in a few minutes.
Update 9:42 PM Pacific time: The “fry” server was restarted, but a technician will be doing some maintenance on the server for approximately an hour. This will require a reboot, meaning the server will be unavailable for approximately 5 – 10 minutes. Web service will be unavailable during that time. E-mail service on that server also will be unavailable; delivery of new incoming mail will suspend during that time and then resume when the server comes back; no e-mail will be lost.
All others servers are unaffected.
Update 10:50 PM Pacific time: The “fry” web server will be rebooted in about 10 minutes, at approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time.
Update 11:10 PM Pacific time: The “fry” web server was successfully rebooted as planned. There may be more maintenance on the server this weekend; watch our blog or follow us on Twitter for updates.
Our FTP servers now support TLS/SSL encryption of FTP passwords, adding more security to FTP.
Confusingly, there are a variety of different SSL/TLS encryption schemes for FTP offered by various FTP clients. The one we support is the most widespread, known as “explicit TLS encryption” of the FTP command channel. It’s defined in RFC 4217.
Encryption is supported by many popular FTP clients, including the FileZilla FTP client. (The quickest way to use it in FileZilla is to put ftpes://ftp.tigertech.net in the QuickConnect “Host” box, then accept the “Unknown certificate”.)
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