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2nd October 2008

Neon Server - Hard drive replacement

One of the hard drives needs to be replaced. This will take 5-10 minutes.

Thanks.

Update: This is completed at this time, thank you.

General announcements 3:12 PM GMT

19th August 2008

New webmail application (Roundcube) installed

Many of you have asked about additional webmail applications that are more functional and nicer on the eye than squirrelmail and horde, and we have listened. On all of our servers (including VPS and Dedicated), you will now see an option for Roundcube, when logging into webmail. Roundcube is really easy on the eye, and even easier to use for those clients who prefer to use webmail instead of an email client.

Thank you.

General announcements 3:04 AM GMT

20th July 2008

PHP 5 will be the default on all servers

On August 15, 2008 we will be upgrading all of our servers (shared, VPS, and dedicated) to use PHP5 by default. The changeover should be very seamless, as we have been running php4 and php5 side by side since June 2006. New servers have php5 by default and are working beautifully. We will be upgrading to PHP 5.2.6.

So we ask that over the next week or so, you go through your scripts and files and please make sure that they work under php5. All you need to do to take advantage of PHP5 is to add the following two lines to an .htaccess file to force .php files be handled by php5:

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

The reason why we are upgrading is because PHP4 is no longer being updated or maintained, which means that in time, there will be more vulnerabilities to exploit it. PHP5 is very stable and has been out for a long time with a proven track record. As a technology based company, we want all of you to have the latest and greatest stable versions of software available.

We are not changing environments, so any mod_php servers will continue to be mod_php and any phpsuexec, will continue to be phpsuexec.

We are not upgrading Mysql, this is strictly a PHP only upgrade.

There is no downtime associated with this changeover. Thank you.

General announcements 9:38 AM GMT

16th July 2008

Neon server maintenance

This Sunday, July 20th 2008, at approximately 12PM-1PM PST (GMT - 8:00) we will take the server off-line to perform various network maintenance tasks.

We anticipate there will be 30 minutes of downtime. Thank you for your understanding.

Update: This is completed at this time, thank you.

General announcements 12:48 AM GMT

6th May 2008

Lion server reboot

The server is having problems in kernel, we’re rebooting it now.

Thank you.

Update: Server is now up and running.

General announcements 11:20 PM GMT

2nd May 2008

cPanel security update

Some of you are now getting errors when logging into your WHM/cPanel. We know about this and there is a reason for this which we’ll discuss shortly.

Update: The reason for this was that we were upgrading all servers.

We were made aware of a serious exploit here:
http://blog.cpanel.net/?p=39

We needed to get all these servers updated. Announcing beforehand, would have been a security risk. We wanted to make sure this was all done before we let everyone know the reason.

So, we are now OK. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. Thank you.

General announcements 10:31 PM GMT

27th April 2008

Single domain hosting upgrades

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve upgraded all single domain hosting accounts in terms of bandwidth and disk space. All current customers have already been upgraded.

We hope you enjoy it :) if you have any questions, thank you.

General announcements 11:07 PM GMT

16th April 2008

One Wilshire issues - update

Futher to the earlier notice: Here is the email we received from One Wildshire staff regarding the power failure on the of the primary and redundant feeds:

April 15, 2008
To: Affected One Wilshire Customers
From: Dominic Tobin, Director of Field Operations
RE: UPS Outage on April 13, 2008

Dear Valued Customers,

Thank you for choosing CRG West as your colocation provider.

The purpose of this letter is to notify you that power from several AC UPS sub‐panel units on One Wilshire’s 11th floor lost service just before 5:00 PM PST on April 13th. All power was restored at approximately 6:25 PM.

The outage was the result of a tripped condition on a 600‐amp main UPS output breaker feeding several sub‐panels. Our Operations team is currently working with multiple third party engineering vendors to evaluate the root cause.

CRG West anticipates a testing period of approximately one week for thorough evaluation of system components before a conclusiv determination will be made. Until that point, CRG West will be monitoring the 600 Amp main feed proactively looking for abnormalities that could result in a repeat occurrene. Please rest assured that CRG West is focused on correcting this problem as expeditiously as possible and delivering best‐in‐class power and cooling uptime.

On behalf of CRG West, I would like to apologize for any inconveniences incurred as a result of these circumstances. Should you have questions, comments or concerns, please contact Jerome Favis, One Wilshire Operations Manager, and he will address them as quickly as possible.

As an industry leader of reliable and secure power systems, we understand the importance of power uptime and are taking every effort to remediate any potential problem. Part of CRG West’s service offering includes routine maintenance and testing on all power components and we regret this weeked’s outage. We will release additional information as soon as it becomes available.

We look forward to strengthening our current relationship and continuing to exceed industry uptime standards. Thank you for choosing CRG West and One Wilshire as your colocation source. CRG West is committed to building strong relationships with every customer and stresses the importance of communicating any tchnical issue quickly and honestly.

Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Dominic Tobin
Director of Field Operations
CRG West

We will continue to update you as we receive more information regarding this issue, we apologize for any inconveniences caused, do if you have any question, thank you.

General announcements 7:41 AM GMT

14th April 2008

One Wilshire issues

We have quite a few servers down in Los Angeles, and we suspect it’s due to a UPS failure. There are many other companies that are on the same floor and all are down as well. More information to be posted shortly.

Update: The problem was very widespread both the primary and redundant feeds failed. So we are waiting on the staff at the datacenter and the electricians to let us know how it was possible. This issue was half the floor, not 1 little cage.. This was a severe issue.

More Info: Main breaker tripped where primary C and D feeds come in. C is primary feed and D is a redundant feed. This was 3 layers up the chain, so that’s why it was a massive failure. So when the breaker tripped, no generator could kick in when the breaker supplying the power tripped. That is the report for now, more to be posted.

Update: All servers have been up for a while now.

General announcements 3:19 AM GMT

10th April 2008

NAC Network Hiccup

About 10-20mins ago, there was a slight network hiccup which effected some routes from some customers. This was not a global issue, but if you were unable to access your website for about 10 minutes there, this would be the cause.

Update: NAC has updated us saying:

At approximately 2:48 PM EST we lost our connection with the London Internet Exchange (LINX) this caused a significant amount of traffic to be rerouted. During this time some instability and latency was experienced. As of now the issue has now been resolved. We are currently investigating the cause of outage. We apologize for any inconvenience the may have caused.

General announcements 8:08 PM GMT

5th March 2008

VPS reboots

The kernels for the VPS servers have been updated and need to be rebooted to take effect.

We have this scheduled for March 6th @ 8pm PST/11pm EST/4am GMT.

The reboots should be quick and painless, averaging about 5mins downtime per server. We will have staff at the datacenter at this time in case of any issues related to this, but we do not forsee any problems related to this upgrade.

Update: These are now complete. Thanks for your patience!

General announcements 7:37 PM GMT

2nd February 2008

Server reboots yesterday

There was an incredibly nasty kernel exploit that affected the 2.6 kernels which the servers run on. The exploit was very dangerous in that anyone who has access to the server could have compromised it. Yesterday, we spent all day upgrading our servers, and as a result no one was affected by this exploit. The reason we didn’t post it yesterday was due to the severity and how easy it would have been to get in the servers via this exploit, and as such we started the upgrades knowing we would post today.

Here is the exploit: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/10/2011257&from=rss

General announcements 11:12 PM GMT

8th August 2007

RVSkins - Webmail issue

There is a current issue with the RVSkins and accessing webmail.

All clients using RVSkins are affected. We are aware of the issue and currently fixing this on ALL servers.

As a temporary workaround you can get to each of the webmail clients directly via the following URL’s (replace domain.com with your domain):

https://domain.com:2096/horde/index.php (for Horde)

https://domain.com:2096/3rdparty/squirrelmail/index.php (for SquirrelMail)

Update: Issue has been fixed on all servers.

General announcements 7:04 PM GMT

24th June 2007

Cpanel 11 upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: Upgrades have been completed on all servers at this time, thank you.

General announcements 5:15 AM GMT

22nd June 2007

NAC down

Looks like NAC is down again. We are trying to get ahold of them. Updates to follow.

Update: We have many servers all coming online now, it looks like NAC had a power outage, as the uptimes on the servers are all 2 minutes.

Update: All servers are up except for hawk which is running an fsck due to the power issue. It should be up shortly.

Update: Hawk is now up and this concludes all the issues. We want to apologize for the problem, as we are waiting for NAC to let us know what happened. Clearly, we see it as a power issue, but it’s important to find out how this could have happened. We will post an update once we get it.

Update from NAC:

From what we can tell at this point the storm caused a lightning strike to a power pole which knocked out utility power to the area.

OCT was initially running on battery power from the UPS systems. The generator in OCT failed to auto-start. This appears to have been due to a problem with the batteries in the generator (this is still under investigation). Once the UPS batteries ran out of power the entire site experienced a power loss. Engineering and Facility staff were able to replace the batteries in the generator and perform a manual start. Once the generator was online, power was restored to the facility. We have been running on generator for approximately the last 2 hours. The power company is currently repairing the damaged equipment and expects to have power restored shortly.

We are still running on generator power at this moment and we have arranged for a fuel delivery at 1:00am to top off the tank in case we have to run the generator for an extended amount of time. We have the ability to run on generator as long as necessary.

In addition during most or all of this time (we don’t know the exact timeline yet) the entire Cedar Knolls (MMU) facility was also running under generator power. To our knowledge the MMU site did NOT experience any problems during this time.

Additional updates to this incident will occur as we gather more data.

General announcements 2:02 AM GMT

15th June 2007

Cpanel 11 upgrades

As many of your know, Cpanel (the control panel software) is upgrading the software to version 11. Version 11 brings a LOT of changes to the system, mostly on the backend of things, but there is also a really nice NEW control panel theme called x3. The upgrade is going to be done in 2 phases since it’s such a major upgrade to the system. The first update will be the code itself, then the second will be more feature oriented, with the addition of apache 2 support, which is a HUGE change. As it stands now, there is no full Apache 2.2 support, but that is said to be coming shortly after the release of CPanel 11. Apache 2.2 is worlds ahead of Apache 2, so we are very excited about this.

There are many changes to the CPanel system, but most are on the backend. Some of them include, Brute Force Detection software (which we already have), Public Key Authentication, Host Access Control, which is nice because you can block specific IPs to certain services, like ftp, ssh, etc.. Enhanced XSS Protection..

In terms of the frontend changes, there is that new X3 CPanel theme that I was speaking about earlier, and there are also some very nice enhancements to the file manager and branding utilities. The new file manager supports drag and drop and 1-2-3 upload capability. With the new editor, you can brand your company on the control panel for your clients. There also is a getting started wizard, which is awesome for a client who has never used CPanel before. It goes through and explains the whole system in a very friendly way.

There are a few things that we need to be concerned about during this upgrade. The first, is in regards to mail, and it’s the most important. Our mail system uses a format for putting email in certain folders, called mbox. CPanel 11 really wants to use another format called maildir. As a result, prior to the upgrade, we will be converting all of our servers to maildir format. While we don’t anticipate there to be any problems, and we have tested this out on development systems, we wanted to make sure all of you were aware of what is going to be done. The second is that perl will be upgraded to version 5.8.8. This won’t affect you. Finally, from the cpanel website, the path for protected directories was changed because with the old system it was impossible to have 2 or more different folders protected with the same foldername, the new system now works with the following:

code:
/home/$user/.htpasswords/public_html/directory-name

for protected directories located in public_html

code:
/home/$user/.htpasswords/directory-name

for protected directories in that users web root.

On Wednesday June 20, 2007 10:00 PM PST (GMT -8:00 )
Due to the complexity of this upgrade, we will be starting with the mbox to mail dir conversion. We are giving ourselves 2 days to have this done on all servers, and go through any issues that may arise.

On Friday, June 22, 2007 at 10:00 PM PST (GMT -8:00 ), we will be upgrading all servers, VPS, and dedicated server clients. We anticipate the upgrade to go through the whole weekend.

Update: All upgrades have been completed at this time, thank you.

General announcements 10:07 AM GMT

1st May 2007

Kernel upgrades

Starting at 6:00 PM PST (GMT -8:00) Tuesday May 1, 2007 we’ll be upgrading the kernels on all our servers. It’s nothing major, and no major enhancements will be seen. It’s good to reboot them, since most have over 150 day uptimes and should be rebooted. We anticipate the reboots to not take more than 5 minutes, but there is always the possibility of FSCK (filesystem checks needed). Thank you.

Update: All upgrades have been completed at this time.

General announcements 12:29 PM GMT

8th November 2006

PHP Upgrades

All servers will be getting upgrades to PHP. All servers that have mod_php will be upgraded to 4.4.3 and all servers that have phpsuexec will be upgraded to PHP 4.4.4. The reason for the differences are due to a vulnerability found in 4.4.4 that affects mod_php. The upgrade will start November 10, 2006 9:00 PM PST (GMT -8:00). No downtime is expected.

Update: All upgrades have been completed at this time. Thank you.

General announcements 3:11 PM GMT

29th January 2006

MySQL upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: Upgrade has been completed on all servers at this time.

General announcements 5:54 AM GMT

20th January 2006

MySQL upgrade

We will be upgrading all server´s MySQL installations to version 4.1.x on Sunday January 29, 2005, at 2:00 AM GMT. The estimated downtime is about 3-5 minutes per server.

Documentation on Changes:

Thank you.

General announcements 8:47 AM GMT

14th December 2005

Antivirus installed

Taking the opportunity during the kernel upgrades, we´re very happy to announce that we’ve installed CLAMAV on all servers. This will drastically diminish the amount of virii you might have otherwise gotten prior. We will be making some tweaks to it throughout the week to make it run at optimal levels.

General announcements 4:15 AM GMT

Kernel upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: All upgrades have been completed at this time.

General announcements 2:10 AM GMT

13th December 2005

Kernel upgrade

In 24 hours we will be starting kernel upgrades on all servers. We will be going to the 2.6.14.2/3 version . There will be some minor performance enhancements for the servers that have the 2.4 stable kernel versions with regard to the SATA drives. Thank you.

General announcements 12:09 PM GMT

15th August 2005

Cpanel upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: upgrades are completed on all servers at this time. The expired license problem should be fixed in this release as well.

General announcements 10:05 AM GMT

12th August 2005

Cpanel upgrades

Upgrades will be conducted on all servers to the latest current Cpanel build this weekend. No downtime and no hiccups of any sort are expected.

General announcements 12:53 PM GMT

10th August 2005

Bandwith upgrades

We are upgrading bandwidth limits for all regular hosting accounts at this time. The new limits are as follows:

All previously created accounts have been upgraded to the new limits at this time as well.

We hope you enjoy the changes :)

General announcements 12:27 PM GMT

3rd July 2005

Kernel upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: all server have been upgraded at this time.

General announcements 3:06 PM GMT

2nd July 2005

Kernel upgrades

Starting tomorrow at 8:00 GMT we will be performing server reboots due to Kernel upgrades. These should not mean more than 2 minutes of down time per server. Thank you.

General announcements 1:05 PM GMT

5th May 2005

Cpanel upgrades - update

All upgrades have been completed.

General announcements 5:11 PM GMT

Cpanel upgrades

Over the course of the next few hours, we will be upgrading cPanel/WHM on all servers to fix a fantastico issue. There will be no downtime or issues associated with the upgrade.

General announcements 1:10 PM GMT

11th April 2005

Kernel upgrades - update

All upgrades have been completed at this time.

General announcements 6:13 AM GMT

10th April 2005

Kernel upgrades

We will be performing kernel upgrades on all servers tomorrow starting at 2am GMT.

Expected downtime on each server is no more than 5 minutes unless a FSCK is required.

General announcements 8:10 AM GMT

13th February 2005

Cpanel upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: upgrades are completed at this time.

General announcements 10:38 PM GMT

11th February 2005

Cpanel upgrades

We will be conducting Cpanel upgrades this weekend on all servers, we expect these upgrades to be completed by Sunday evening.

This update includes mostly bug and security fixes while you might also notice a few other changes we definitely do not expect anything major to change.

General announcements 12:37 PM GMT

27th January 2005

SMTP port 25 blocking

It has come to our attention this morning that a few more ISPs are starting to block port 25. If you or your clients are having problems sending email, the first thing you should do is change your SMTP port to port 26 instead of port 25. If that doesn’t work, please so that we can troubleshoot further, however, most of the time, that’s the issue at hand if you simply can’t send email but you can receive.

General announcements 6:48 PM GMT

26th January 2005

Comment spam on blogs

As most of you are probably aware, there is a huge issue with comment spam on blogs right now. There are a few ways you can control the comment spam in your blog/s, for example, here’s a guide on how to do so for MovableType.

We don’t forsee taking any drastic moves to prevent comment spam (such as banning MovableType) however what we are doing, and will begin doing a bit more aggressively is disabling mt-comments.cgi scripts which are getting hit hard with spam.

Basically if the script is one of the top resource users on a server, it will be disabled. This will of course be a last resort, but we can’t let the scripts bring the rest of the server down with them.

Thank you for your understanding on this issue.

General announcements 9:51 AM GMT

23rd January 2005

Kernel upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: All kernel upgrades are complete at this time.

General announcements 2:18 AM GMT

22nd January 2005

Kernel upgrades

We will be performing emergency kernel upgrades on all servers this afternoon/evening. Each server will be rebooted one at a time to ensure that it comes back online before doing the next one.

Expected downtime on each server is no more than 5 minutes unless a FSCK is required.

General announcements 10:48 PM GMT

24th December 2004

Merry christmas

We just wanted to wish everyone a merry christmas, we hope that everyone gets what they wished for. Enjoy your dinners. :)

General announcements 6:18 PM GMT

21st December 2004

Kernel patch - update

Further to the earlier notice: All kernel patches are completed at this time.

General announcements 8:16 AM GMT

20th December 2004

Kernel patch

We will be conducting reboots of each server in order to patch the kernel against the latest kernel exploits. These reboots will start in roughly 12 hours from now.

Each reboot should consist of no more than 3-5 minutes of downtime, however can possibly consist of up to 20 minutes if a FSCK has to be performed. We will be doing them one by one in alphabetical order.

General announcements 6:01 PM GMT

16th December 2004

PHP upgrades - update

All updates are completed at this time.

General announcements 5:05 AM GMT

PHP upgrades

Tonight we’ll be upgrading php on all servers as there was a vulnerability released today on some security sites. There shouldn’t be any downtime associated with this, just a quick apache restart. We’re going to start the updates in 4 hours.

General announcements 12:00 AM GMT

21st November 2004

Kernel upgrades - update

All servers have been updated at this time.

General announcements 2:52 PM GMT

Kernel upgrades

We will be conducting kernel upgrades tonight due to security holes found in the 2.4.27 linux kernel.

These upgrades will only consist of a server reboot; each server should be down for no more than 5 minutes unless it needs a FSCK.

General announcements 2:31 PM GMT

16th November 2004

Squirrelmail currently avaliable

For your convenience, Squirrelmail is now be avaliable to all servers alongside of Horde and Neomail.

General announcements 11:54 PM GMT

30th October 2004

Apache upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: Upgrades are complete at this time

General announcements 4:46 AM GMT

29th October 2004

Apache upgrades

Starting tonight at 2:00 am GMT we will be upgrading Apache on all servers. The upgrades should be seamless, each server will at most have 2-3 minutes of downtime.

This is to address two security concerns in Apache 1.3.32, and upgrade to Apache 1.3.33

General announcements 9:28 PM GMT

NAC network maintenance

NAC has just alerted us to a maintenance window occurring on Sunday, October 31st, 2004.

During this maintenance window they will be performing CatOS upgrades on various switches. This maintenance will affect all servers.

The maintenance window will commence at 7:30 am GMT.

We expect less than 30 minutes of downtime.

General announcements 6:42 PM GMT

19th October 2004

Emergency Cpanel upgrade - update

All servers have been updated at this time.

General announcements 1:05 PM GMT

Emergency Cpanel upgrade

We will be conducting an emergency upgrade of Cpanel on all servers tonight to patch three seperate security issues which were posted to the public today.

No downtime should result from this. Please let us know if you have any issues after the upgrade.

General announcements 8:18 AM GMT

10th September 2004

Network issues - update

Issues seem to fixed at this time, we’re still closely monitoring for any other hiccups.

General announcements 11:42 PM GMT

Network issues

Servers may be experiencing packet loss at this time.

NAC seems to have some networking issues. Basically what happened is they put us on a new switch, except three IP blocks are shared among two networks. We’re working with NAC on this now.

General announcements 11:06 PM GMT

28th August 2004

Network issues - update

The issues seem to be fixed at this time, we are still closely monitoring the network.

General announcements 11:58 PM GMT

Network issues

We are seeing off and on packet loss on the network due to a DoS attack. We are working closely to filter this as quickly as possible.

General announcements 9:54 PM GMT

14th August 2004

Kernel upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: All upgrades have been completed at this time.

General announcements 9:47 AM GMT

13th August 2004

Kernel upgrade

We’ll be performing a kernel upgrade (and optimizations) on all servers Saturday morning (14 Aug) at 8:00am GMT.

After this kernel upgrade is completed, servers will need to be rebooted. Downtime should be less than five minutes, unless a FSCK is neccessary, which will then increase the downtime to 15-20 minutes most likely. We don’t expect a FSCK on any of the servers.

These kernel upgrades should help with some disk writing/reading performance issues we are seeing on some servers, as well as harden the kernels even more.

General announcements 3:22 PM GMT

9th August 2004

Shared SSL now avaliable

We have just finished installing shared SSL certs on all Scionhost servers as another tool to assist you in growing. They will be an added feature to the existing pricing and clients.

For security reasons, we will not disclose the domains we have registered for this purpose, existing clients that would like to take advantage of the shared SSL certificates, please contact us for more information.

General announcements 2:34 PM GMT

5th August 2004

Rvskin installed

We have great news for both reseller and regular hosting customers. We have just installed the rvskins on all servers.

Rvskin is a multi-languages, multi-themes advanced skin management software for a Cpanel enabled server. It let’s resellers have more control over their customer’s Cpanel, as well as having multiple languages, including: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swedish, Russian, Romanian, Dutch, Brazilian-Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Italian, Arabic, Norwegian, Finnish, Indonesian and Japanese.

You can see the full feature list here.

Resellers can log in into their webhost manager and click the “modify an account” link to the right, afterwards choose the domain they would like to change to Rvskins and then just pick any of the rvskins colors avaliable from the drop down list.

Starting today it will also be the new default skin for regular hosting accounts.

General announcements 4:39 PM GMT

Security maintenance: Kernel patch - update

All upgrades have been completed.

General announcements 3:33 PM GMT

Security maintenance: Kernel patch

Due to flaws within the linux kernel versions lesser than 2.4.26 and 2.6.7, as disclosed here, we will be updating all of our server’s kernels with a patch to rectify this issue within the next 24 hours.

This will mean that the servers will be rebooted once a new kernel has been compiled, in order to apply the new patched kernel.

Downtime expected: 5 to 10 minutes per server.

Thank you in advance for your understanding during this necessary security update.

General announcements 1:26 PM GMT

31st July 2004

Fantastico maintenance - update

All servers are now running 2.8 r11.

General announcements 1:40 PM GMT

Fantastico maintenance

I’m upgrading Fantastico on all servers today. If you have any requests for additional scripts to be added to Fantastico or for any current Fantastico scripts to be upgraded let me know, and I’ll compile all the requests and open a ticket with Fantastico.

All servers will soon be running Fantastico De Luxe 2.8 r11.

General announcements 1:27 PM GMT

15th July 2004

PHP upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: All server’s php installations have been upgraded at this time.

General announcements 11:06 AM GMT

14th July 2004

PHP upgrade

Due to flaws present within php version 4.3.7 or less, we will be upgrading our php installations to the latest 4.x Stable version of php - 4.3.8 (security release) over the 24 hours on all servers.

This security update is required in order to avoid a system compromise of data.

Further details regarding the 4.3.8 release may be viewed here: http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.3.8

General announcements 9:53 PM GMT

15th June 2004

Security maintenance: Kernel patch - update

Further to the earlier notice: The Kernel update is now complete on all servers.

General announcements 6:37 PM GMT

14th June 2004

Security maintenance: Kernel patch

Due to a flaw within the linux kernel, that can be exploited by a local user to instantly crash machines, we will be patching all of our servers against this problem over the next 24 hours.

The security update will commence in around an hour from this announcement being made. This will mean that your server will be rebooted to apply the new patched kernel.

Downtime expected: 5 to 10 minutes per server.

If a fsck (File System Check) is required upon reboot, it may take up to 20 minutes more for that server.

Thank you in advance for your understanding during this necessary security update.

General announcements 6:27 PM GMT

9th June 2004

PHP upgrade - 2nd update

Further to the earlier notice: All server’s PHP installations have been upgraded to 4.3.7 at this time.

General announcements 6:32 PM GMT

8th June 2004

PHP upgrade - update

The upgrade on all non phpsuexec enabled servers has been completed.

General announcements 6:03 PM GMT

PHP upgrade

Due to a security problem with mod_php and the suexec patch installed with Cpanel’s apache we will be reinstalling apache and upgrading all servers php installations to version 4.3.7.

This will commence immediately following this announcement. A Cpanel update will be completed as well after the apache/php installations on each server.

This does not affect phpsuexec installations of php. We will however upgrade php to version 4.3.7 across all servers once all of the non phpsuexec servers have been upgraded.

General announcements 1:58 PM GMT

7th June 2004

ImageMagick upgrades - update

All servers now have ImageMagick updated to 6.0.2.

General announcements 12:45 AM GMT

ImageMagick upgrades

I’ll be updating ImageMagick on all servers to 6.0.2 shortly.

There won’t be any downtime, and most likely, you won’t notice a difference, however, if interested you can read the Changelog or ImageMagick news.

General announcements 12:14 AM GMT

6th June 2004

Cpanel upgrades - 2nd update

Further to the earlier notice: Cpanel upgrade on all servers has now been completed. Cpanel/Zend/Apache is now standardized (version wise) across all servers.

General announcements 5:36 PM GMT

5th June 2004

Cpanel upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: The Cpanel upgrades are taking longer than anticipated and we will be taking a break from them. However they haven’t been causing any downtime. All servers will be done by Sunday evening.

General announcements 3:08 AM GMT

4th June 2004

Cpanel upgrades

We will be performing Cpanel upgrades on all servers tonight, as well as attempting to synchronize server software (such as ImageMagick, Zend, et cetera).

The new Cpanel version will bring many bug fixes, as well as a few other significant changes, such as:

I will be starting the upgrades at around 7 pm GMT. Each server may have a few minutes of POP3/Services downtime during the upgrade, however it shouldn’t be noticable.

General announcements 6:09 PM GMT

25th May 2004

Apache upgrade - 2nd update

Further to the earlier notice: Apache has been upgraded to version 1.3.31 on all remaning servers.

General announcements 11:01 PM GMT

24th May 2004

Apache upgrade - update

All servers running apache/php/phpsuexec have been upgraded.

The remaining servers (which are not vulnerable to the 1.3.29 phpsuexec problem) will be completed over the next 12-24 hours.

General announcements 8:31 PM GMT

Apache upgrade

Due to a bug within apache/php (phpsuexec) we will be upgrading apache on all servers running phpsuexec immediately from posting this notice.

Servers running apache 1.3.29 with apache/php module installations (mod_php4) will also be upgraded to version 1.3.31 within the next 12-24 hours.

Downtime expected: None, however there may be a very brief apache outage during the installation in some cases.

General announcements 8:19 PM GMT

Case swap on Lion - 3rd update

Lion is back online following the case swap. Please contact us via e-mail or the helpdesk if you have any problems following this outage. Thank you.

General announcements 6:40 AM GMT

11th May 2004

Exim upgrade - update

The updates on all servers have now been completed.

General announcements 8:35 PM GMT

Exim upgrade

Due to a bug within exim, I am proceeding to upgrade our exim installations across all servers presently.

There should cause little to no impact to the mail service during this upgrade.

Thank you.

General announcements 8:04 PM GMT

10th May 2004

Rack power upgrades - update

Further to the earlier notice: The swap is now complete and all servers are now running on the new power bars.

General announcements 1:14 AM GMT

8th May 2004

Rack power upgrades

Further to previous messages, we now have some APC (AP7901) remote reboot units in stock and can replace the standard power bars in use in the our racks.

We will be making the swap at 1:00 am GMT this Monday.

These APC power bars offer quite a few benefits, they have digital ammeters with a web based interface so that we can regularly monitor loads and avoid any further tripping of the power, and they offer port by port rebootability -meaning instant reboots from any web enabled device.

Downtime is estimated to be around 30 minutes in total. Thank you for you patience.

General announcements 1:23 AM GMT

27th April 2004

Power bar upgrade - update

The power swap is completely done. Thank you for you patience.

General announcements 6:15 PM GMT

Power bar upgrade

All servers are being moved to 2 new power bars at around 5pm GMT to prevent power tripping issues that we seem to have experienced. This is considered emergency maintainence, as we tripped the circuit again this morning.

We are also moving one of the switches to a new power strip, The switch is being done first to prevent excessive downtime on other servers.

The actual physical swap will take minutes, we expect most servers to come up immediately, while there might be a few that need to FSCK (file system check) in which case it can take up to 15-20 minutes.

Thank you for your patience with us here.

General announcements 3:13 PM GMT

21st April 2004

Kernel upgrade - update

The kernel upgrade has been completed on all servers.

General announcements 6:31 PM GMT

Kernel upgrade

Following the discovery of a local exploit with potential privilege of escalation being present within all linux kernels 2.4.26 and older, I will be upgrading our kernels over the next few hours on all servers.

Downtime involved is expected to be just a few minutes per server, however if the server requires a fsck upon reboot, then the fsck may take around 10-20 minutes to complete.

General announcements 1:11 PM GMT

30th March 2004

Cpanel upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: The Cpanel upgrade has been completed on all server at this time.

General announcements 11:18 AM GMT

29th March 2004

Cpanel upgrade

Commencing Tuesday 30th of March at 9:00 am GMT we will be updating all of our server’s Cpanels to the latest stable release.

Brief pop outages can be expected while Cpanel is being updated.

General announcements 7:31 PM GMT

23rd March 2004

Network maintenance on all servers - 2nd update

The servers are back online, work has been completed at this time and the network is now stable again.

General announcements 8:10 PM GMT

Network maintenance on all servers - update

Further to the earlier notice: We will be commencing the upgrade of the switches as announced yesterday within the next hour.

This will cause a brief interruption to service while being carried out.

Thank you for your patience during this period.

General announcements 6:13 PM GMT

22nd March 2004

Network maintenance on all servers

We will be upgrading all network switches that are serving all of the servers. This work is scheduled to be carried out in around 24 hours time from this notice.

This maintenance has been deemed necessary due to recent problems with a similar switch on our network and as a result of that, we are fitting an identical upgraded switch to maintain network standardization and to ensure network stability.

The maintenance time is expected to be between 15-30 minutes. During this time, your server will be unreachable.

General announcements 8:13 PM GMT

16th March 2004

Fantastico upgrade - update

The fantastico upgrade has been completed on all servers.

General announcements 2:49 AM GMT

Fantastico upgrade

Fantastico is currently being updated to the latest release on all servers and the update will be completed shortly.

Thank you.

General announcements 2:13 AM GMT

14th March 2004

Cpanel upgrade, MySQL upgrade - update

Further to the earlier notice: A Cpanel vulnerability has been found regarding a feature that allowed user passwords to be updated by e-mail.

Further details regarding this can be read on:
http://www.securityfocus.com/…/2004-03-15/0

This Cpanel vulnerability has been found to escalate to other functions and as such all servers have already been upgraded to the new versions of both Cpanel and MySQL.

General announcements 10:21 PM GMT

Datacenter network maintenance on Sunday, March 14th, 2004 - update

Further to the earlier notice: Network maintenance has been completed on all servers at this time.

General announcements 7:53 AM GMT

12th March 2004

Cpanel upgrade, MySQL upgrade

Commencing from Thursday 18 March, we will be updating Cpanel to the latest stable release, as well as upgrading MySQL to version 4.0.18 on all servers.

Ugrades on all server should be completed by Friday 19th March.

General announcements 4:40 PM GMT

9th March 2004

Datacenter network maintenance on Sunday, March 14th, 2004

On sunday, March 14th, 2004 our datacenter will be installing an OC-12 SONET card to handle our upcoming OC-12 to UUNET/MCI. The maintenance window will commence at 7:00:00 am GMT.

In order to insert the new OC-12 card, the FPC in which it will reside in must be temporarily removed. We will experience a brief service interruption, which we do not anticipate lasting more than 5 minutes. We also may experience sporadic higher than normal latency during this maintenance window. The maximum duration of this maintenance window is one 1 hour.

General announcements 4:08 PM GMT

2nd March 2004

Network outage - update

Network connectivity has been re-established and all servers are back online at this time.

General announcements 9:11 AM GMT

Network outage

Nac seems to be having some network difficulties at present.

This is affecting all servers.

I’m trying to establish the cause of this presently.

General announcements 9:03 AM GMT

24th February 2004

PHP upgrade to 4.3.4 - update

Further to the earlier notice: All PHP upgrades have been completed at this time.

General announcements 10:24 AM GMT

23rd February 2004

New Cpanel themes installation - update

All servers have been updated with the new cpanel themes.

General announcements 2:22 AM GMT

New Cpanel themes installation

Over the next 60 minutes we are going to be installing these new Cpanel themes:

These themes will be available on all servers to resellers only. The only special thing needed to be done when changing to this theme is make sure the language is specified. Either use ’simskins-English’ or ’simskins-Portuguese’. If you do not select a Langauge, or just use ‘English’ there will be some features missing on your Cpanel.

So, please remember to select either ’simskins-English’ or ’simskins-Portuguese’ when migrating clients to this theme.

In order to use the new simskins themes on your accounts, you will need to access your WHM and select the ‘Modify Account’ link, then select the account that you wish to use the new theme.

General announcements 1:45 AM GMT

19th February 2004

Kernel upgrade to 2.4.25 - update

Upgrade complete, new kernel applied to all servers.

General announcements 11:32 PM GMT

Kernel upgrade to 2.4.25

Following the announcement of yet another Kernel bug present within all linux kernels 2.4.24 and below, we will be upgrading our kernels over the next few hours to a patched version of the 2.4.25 linux kernel.

The grsecurity patched kernels further securing our systems.

Downtime involved is expected to be just a few minutes per server, however if the server requires a fsck upon reboot, then the fsck may take around 10-20 minutes to complete.

General announcements 10:12 PM GMT

16th February 2004

PHP upgrade to 4.3.4

We will be upgrading our php installations on all servers to version 4.3.4 commencing from Tuesday 24th February 09:00 GMT, until completion.

The upgrade has been requested by many users and also includes many bug fixes from the earlier releases. To view the changelog please review: http://www.php.net/changelog-4.php.

General announcements 2:37 PM GMT

2nd February 2004

New Simskins themes - update

The installations have been completed.

General announcements 1:05 PM GMT

New Simskins themes

We will be installing the new Simskins Cpanel themes on all servers, commencing within 30-60 minutes from this post.

The simskins are no longer individual skins/themes for each version, you are able to switch the theme colours (babysim, redsim, graysim, bluesim of old), within the one theme, with more theme colours being available too.

Important notes for resellers:

New theme names:

(fantastico_simskins have the fantastico auto install scripts included.)

You should migrate clients as required to use the new themes, as the original simskins themes, redsim, graysim, bluesim babysim and the fantastico enabled simskins themes will not be updated and will be removed at the next Cpanel update (As a new stable Cpanel release becomes available, we have no time frame on this presently).

In order to use the new simskins themes on your accounts, you will need to access your WHM and select the ‘Modify Account’ link, then select the account that you wish to use the new simskins theme.

You also need to modify the language used to use one of the following ’simskins-English’ or ’simskins-Portuguese’.

The language must be changed as there are some elements that will not show correctly if you use the default Cpanel english language.

General announcements 11:53 AM GMT

6th January 2004

Kernel upgrade - update

All servers are back online, new kernel applied.

General announcements 8:11 AM GMT

Kernel upgrade

All servers will need to be rebooted this evening due to an upgraded kernel version that is to be installed.

This is due to new exploits being found within all kernels 2.4.24 and below (2.4.26 is included). This affects all servers.

Each server will be rebooted and the new kernel applied within 5-10 minutes as a guideline.

Thank you for your understanding throughout this necessary procedure.

General announcements 6:33 AM GMT

1st January 2004

Fantastico update: Fantastico Deluxe - update

Fantastico Deluxe has been installed on all servers.

Enjoy.

General announcements 1:32 PM GMT

Fantastico update: Fantastico Deluxe

I’m in the process of updating our “fantastico” software and applications that are installed on all servers.

Fantastico enables the auto installation of many applications using just a few clicks.

This update should be completed within the next few hours across all servers.

The new Fantastico Deluxe software is being installed. Further details regarding Fantastico Deluxe and it’s included new applications can be found at: http://cpanelthemes.com/fantastico.php or the respective developers websites.

General announcements 11:51 AM GMT

2nd December 2003

Kernel upgrade - update

All kernel upgrades have been completed.

Thank you all for your patience while this emergency procedure was carried out.

Now that we are done, here are the details of the bug/root exploit that exists within all linux kernels prior to version 2.4.23 for those that do not already know: http://www.securityfocus.com/…/2003-12-05/0.

General announcements 1:27 PM GMT

Kernel upgrade

All servers will be rebooted this evening in order to apply a new secure kernel - A bug has been found with all kernels 2.4.23 and below.

We are upgrading our kernels to version 2.4.23 as soon as possible.

General announcements 11:00 AM GMT

27th November 2003

Apache upgrade - update

All Apache upgrades have now been completed.

General announcements 11:03 PM GMT

Apache upgrade

We will be upgrading Apache to version 1.3.29 across all servers, commencing in around 4 hours from this post.

Version 1.3.29 includes bug fixes and security updates from version 1.3.28. More info can be found at the official Apache website: http://httpd.apache.org/.

Estimated installation time: 5-10 Minutes.
Downtime: less than 1 minute for Apache restart.

General announcements 6:18 PM GMT

14th November 2003

Perl and Perl module issues - update

Fixes have been completed on all servers at this time.

General announcements 1:24 PM GMT

Perl and Perl module issues

People are experiencing problems with perl and various perl modules.

I am currently rectifying this issue that has been brought about by a Cpanel security update.

All will be resolved shortly.

General announcements 12:50 PM GMT

9th November 2003

Simskins upgrade - update

The updates have been completed.

General announcements 10:35 AM GMT

Simskins upgrade

We’ll be upgrading our simskins Cpanel themes to the latest version available shortly.

All fantastico enabled Cpanel themes will be updated with the latest files also at the same time.

General announcements 9:16 AM GMT

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