Ruby on Rails updated to version 1.2.3

We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 1.2.3.

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A defense against some MySQL connection problems

A couple of times in the last week, we’ve seen one of our MySQL database servers have an unusually high number of connections. That’s a serious issue: If there are too many connections to a MySQL server, customer scripts won’t be able to connect to a database, so we’ve spent some time looking at the cause and fixing it.

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Which server is my account on?

Some of the posts on our blog mention specific servers. You’ll occasionally see things like “The web14 server will be rebooted at 11 PM”, “mail sent from the web01 server was delayed”, or “more memory has been added to the web10 server”. Your question, quite naturally, is “How do I know if they’re talking about the server that has my account?”

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PHP 5 Upgraded for Security

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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PEAR package updates

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.

PHP 4 Upgraded for Security

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.