A customer pointed out that our servers didn’t have many “locales” installed. A “locale” is a set of rules that apply to a language, region or culture — things like the language’s words for “January” and “Monday”, the way that dates are displayed, and the currency symbol used.
We applied a MySQL security update tonight. The version number remains 5.0.32, and customers should not notice any changes; the update just fixes several security issues.
The update was performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that MySQL was unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero MySQL downtime.
We’ve updated several things on our servers today:
We’ve installed several software upgrades on our servers. First of all, updates to our new Webmail system over the last few days fix:
These fixes solve all the bugs that we know of in the new Webmail system (although we have plenty of feature requests that we’re working on). If you’re still using the old system, now’s the time to switch, or to let us know why you’re using the old system so we can address that.
In addition, we also upgraded the following software on our servers Monday night:
As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
If you write your own PHP scripts that allow file uploads, we’ve discovered an unusual issue that might affect you. The “permissions” PHP gives to newly uploaded files aren’t always the same — and a recent change to our servers may have altered the permissions your script sees.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday August 11, all Tiger Technologies Web hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites, as well as the Tiger Technologies Web site, will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. E-mail service will not be affected.
This brief maintenance is necessary for two reasons. First, we’re upgrading the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. Secondly, we’re adding more memory to our hosting servers, so that each server will have 4 GB of RAM instead of the current 2 GB.
We’ve finished upgrading all our Web hosting servers to use MySQL 5.0.32, as we explained in this earlier post. The total time that MySQL databases were unavailable averaged about ten minutes per server. Again, we regret any downtime — this was unavoidable for such a major upgrade.
You should not notice any difference in how your site operates. In the unlikely event you have any problems, please contact us by opening a ticket so we can help.
This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
We have installed Midnight Commander on all of our servers. Midnight Commander is a file manager program which runs in a shell window and lets you manage the files on your Web site. Midnight Commander splits the screen in two, letting you select different directories on each side. You can then move, copy, and rename files and directories, and perform many other operations.
Midnight Commander is designed for users who connect to the shell but may not be fully comfortable with typing commands on the command line.
We’ve installed several security updates recently. We’ve updated PHP 4, PHP 5, the ClamAV antivirus scanner, and some XFree86 libraries. In addition, we’ve updated our own blog to use WordPress 2.2 — if you use WordPress, make sure you’ve done the same.
