Perl security update applied

We’ve updated the Perl programming language on our servers with a security update.

The update only fixes one security bug, and customers should not notice any changes in how Perl works.

Apache and MySQL updated

We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server and MySQL database server software to cover recent minor security updates. Customers should not notice any changes.

PHP 5 updated

We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5.

Rsync 3 available

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.

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 20 (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (September 20), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.

No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.

This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Update: the maintenance was completed with less than three minutes “downtime” per server.

Ruby on Rails updated to version 2.1.1

We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduled maintenance for software updates (completed)

Due to software updates on our servers, most Web hosting customers will experience about ten minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:

• Friday, August 22 (servers beginning with letter “l-z”)
• Saturday, August 23 (servers beginning with letter “a-k”)

(The servers named “bender” and “lrrr” have already been upgraded, and those customers are not affected.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, March 1 (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (March 1), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.

No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.

This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. This was also done two weeks ago; unfortunately our operating system vendor has released an even newer kernel since then — it doesn’t usually happen this often.

We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

(This maintenance was also successfully completed with less than four minutes of downtime per server.)

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, February 16 (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (February 16), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.

No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.

This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

(This maintenance was successfully completed with less than four minutes of downtime per server.)

MySQL and PHP 5 Security Updates

We’ve installed MySQL and PHP 5 security updates. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5 and MySQL.

The updates were performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that PHP and MySQL were unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero downtime.

Read the rest of this entry »