One of our Web servers (the “farnsworth” server) stopped responding at 7:07 PM Pacific time today, and needed to be forcibly restarted. This resulted in a Web server and FTP server outage of about 15 minutes for some customers, although most sites were unaffected.
After being restarted, the server is responding properly, but still showing a problem with one of the disks in its RAID array. Because of that, we plan to replace the disk to prevent future problems, meaning we’ll restart that server again later tonight (after 11 PM Pacific time).
We apologize to all customers affected; we strive hard to avoid this kind of problem.
We’ve updated PHP 5 on our servers to cover sixteen recently identified security issues. This only affects customers who have chosen to use PHP 5 — but since this upgrade only fixes security bugs, even those customers shouldn’t notice any changes.
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We’re currently seeing about 15% “packet loss” from our data center to a handful of locations on the Internet (notably connections that go through the above.net backbone). Most people aren’t affected by this, but for those that are, this can cause connections to be slower than normal. We have a ticket open with the data center for this issue, and we’ll update this page when it’s resolved.
Update May 20: The packet loss problem was effectively resolved on Friday, although we’ve been monitoring the above.net backbone connection closely to ensure that there is no ongoing problem. Although we’ve seen a couple of short latency issues that we’re still following up with the data center about, customers are not experiencing any problems.
No matter how hard we try to make sure that other ISPs never block mail from our servers, it happens occasionally. All it takes is someone at another ISP clicking “this is spam” on a few legitimate messages sent by one of our customers, and some automated system at the other ISP thinks “hey, one of these tigertech.net servers is sending spam; let’s block it for a while without bothering to notify them, ‘for your convenience'”.
Now, we should emphasize that this is actually quite rare.
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We’ll be talking a lot about “security updates” on the blog, so a word about what these are and how we handle them is probably in order.
There are literally thousands of software programs on our servers, most of which are written by other people and used by many companies. From time to time, “security vulnerabilities” with these kinds of programs are discovered. A security vulnerability is something that could allow a “hacker” (or “cracker”, for purists, although that battle has been lost) to take advantage of a programming bug to do something unauthorized with the program, such as send spam or delete files.
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The following stable PEAR packages were updated on our hosting servers today:
- File_SearchReplace: 1.1.1 to 1.1.2
- Net_UserAgent_Detect: 2.2.0 to 2.3.0
- PEAR: 1.5.1 to 1.5.3
The full list of PEAR modules we have available (and more details about PEAR) is on this page.
We’ve updated PHP 4 on our servers to cover six recently identified security issues. Users shouldn’t notice any changes.
An upgrade for PHP 5 is also in progress. After testing, we actually rolled out the update onto our servers for a short time, until a customer reported an unusual problem with vBulletin posts getting cut off when they contain an odd number of apostrophes shortly afterward. This problem appears to be related to the update, so we have rolled back to the previous version of PHP 5 while we investigate this. (This kind of thing is very rare: this is the first security update in over year that has caused a problem. We have a suite of “regression tests” that we use to test PHP upgrades, and there wasn’t a general problem with it. We’ll follow up with more details when we know more.)
By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with what we mean by a “security update”, this page will help.
Welcome to the Tiger Technologies blog!
Although we already have a mailing list for Important Announcements, we try to keep traffic there to a minimum. But there are lots of other things happening that we’d sometimes like to share — everything from minor software updates on our servers to useful tips from our support staff.
One of the most useful features is RSS feeds. RSS feeds let you use a feed reader to “subscribe” to all the posts on the blog, or just to particular categories. For example, if you want to see the key things we think every well-informed customer might want to know, you could subscribe to the “Blog Highlights” feed. Or, if you want to know about every last technical change we make to our server platform, the “Tech Corner” feed is for you!
By the way, we should mention that we’ll probably be making lots of changes to the blog as it evolves. We may even change the names of some of the categories, which would cause your RSS feed to stop working. If that happens, you can simply visit the blog again and re-subscribe to the new feed name.
We hope this blog is useful, and we welcome comments and feedback.
