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 »
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.)
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.)
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 »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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:
- Ruby on Rails was updated from version 1.2.3 to 1.2.6. (If you use Rails on your site, our page explaining how to freeze Rails explains how you can get total control of Rails updates.)
- phpMyAdmin was updated from version 2.11.2.1 to 2.11.2.2.
- The WordPress software that runs this blog was updated to version 2.3.1. That doesn’t directly affect our customers — but if you’ve installed your own version of WordPress on your own site, this is a good reminder to update it: some older versions have security vulnerabilities. (We found that the update from 2.2.X to 2.3.1 was painless.)
We’ve installed several software upgrades on our servers. First of all, updates to our new Webmail system over the last few days fix:
- An incompatibility with Mac OS Internet Explorer version 5.1 and earlier.
- A problem that could cause an outgoing message to have an invalid “Reply-To” field in rare circumstances.
- A bug where messages in the Sent folder could appear out of order.
- An issue reported by one user that prevented viewing of a message with bad HTML code.
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:
- Ruby security updates (including libopenssl-ruby).
- Perl and PCRE security updates (this update was intentionally delayed due to the need for extra testing mentioned in the Debian PCRE announcement).
- MySQL client libraries that provide MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.1 backwards compatibility. (Updates to MySQL 5 are forthcoming but not yet ready.)
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
