At 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight (November 24), the “elzar” and “farnsworth” servers will be restarted. As a result, Web sites and e-mail service for customers using those servers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
The “mom” server experienced high load starting at around 10:45 AM (Pacific time) this morning. We restarted it just before 11:00, and it’s now working normally.
We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server and MySQL database server software to cover recent minor security updates. Customers should not notice any changes.
In the past few months, we’ve made a couple of behind-the-scenes improvements to our mail systems that have improved reliability for our customers.
As regular readers know, our blog is usually about the (often boring) technical details of Web hosting service. This post is different. We want to publicly state that our company is opposed to Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would take away marriage rights for some Californians.
This morning at 12:11 AM (Pacific time), one of the cabinets at our data center tripped a circuit breaker, causing all of the servers in that cabinet to lose power. Power was restored at 12:18 AM.
Customer Web sites and e-mail on the bender, calculon, lrrr, and zapp Web servers were unavailable during this 7 minute period. The ability to send and receive e-mail was also interrupted (no mail was lost, of course).
We are investigating the root cause of this problem to prevent it from happening again.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight (October 18), the “calculon” Web server will be restarted. As a result, Web sites and e-mail service for customers using that server will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5.
Due to a problem with our spam filtering system, some customers received blank incoming messages between 11:35 and 11:53 AM (Pacific time) this morning.
A non-blank copy of these messages was also properly delivered (although with a delay), so no mail is missing.
We have permanently fixed the underlying cause of the problem, and we apologize for the concern and annoyance this caused.
We’ve updated rsync to version 3 on our servers. (We’re using Debian version 3.0.3-2, which includes patches from rsync 3.0.4.)
Rsync 3 is significantly faster than previous versions for recursive file transfers (which we use in our backup system). However, the new version is backward compatible with rsync 2.x, so users shouldn’t notice any changes or problems, even if you haven’t updated your own copy of rsync.
