We finished upgrading the two servers from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.2 early Friday morning. We only upgraded two servers so that we can test the procedure and it is also easier to handle support related requests on a smaller scale. The upgrade procedure actually went a lot more smoothly than I figured it would. There were a couple of complications regarding the procedure but these were easily rectified. I was really surprised as to how easy this upgrade went. We’ve only received a couple of support request regarding the upgrade and those were tied to the complications that we have already resolved. I am going to monitor the situation for the next week or so before I do another round of upgrades.

The servers that were affected by this upgrade were written specifically. If you had an account on one of these servers you should have received a notice before the upgrade detailing the upgrade. We did receive a lot of bounce messages when we sent out these notices. I encourage everyone to please be sure that your contact information with us is up-to-date. If we have an outdated e-mail address on file for your account, we’re not going to have any way to contact you regarding issues like this.

If you were affected by this upgrade and you are experiencing problems please be sure to contact our support team so that they can investigate the issue. We are wanting to know if there are any major issues regarding this upgrade before proceeding too far with the upgrade.

Scott

The issue regarding Horde has been resolved and Horde is once again available to everyone. If you experience any problems, please submit a support request.

Steven

We have temporarily disabled Horde webmail across all of our servers as a security precaution. We have learnt through a security bulletin from cPanel that there is an exploit on the Internet that is affecting Horde. The cPanel developers are working on developing a patch for this issue. They have advised that all webhosts disable Horde to prevent the vulnerability from causing problems on the servers. This is the advice that we are following and this is why Horde has been disabled.

I don’t know when the patch will be rolled out, hopefully it will not take too long. However for the sake of security we decided to follow cPanel’s advice and disable Horde for the time being until this issue can be sorted out.

All of your e-mail and Horde settings will remain intact. Nothing has been lost. You can continue to use Squirrelmail for webmail. Once the issue with Horde is resolved we will re-enable Horde on the servers and you will again have access to Horde.

Steven

We are working on plans to upgrade all of our servers to the newer Apache system, Apache 2.2. Currently our servers are running off of the Apache 1.3 system. Apache 1.3 has served us very well over the years, but Apache 2.2 is becoming the defacto standard in the webhosting community and it has really matured a lot since its first release back in December of 2005.

Almost all of the new features in Apache 2.2 are backend oriented. End users themselves won’t notice much of a difference. There may be some performance increases as the code has been optimized over the years to handle data better. The main reason for the upgrade to Apache 2.2 is so that we can bring our hosting packages in line with the rest of the webhosting community. A lot of webhosts have been running Apache 2.2 for several months and there have been no reported problems regarding the new system. The Apache group will eventually end support for Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.2 is the new direction that the group is taking.

We are going to be handling this upgrade very slowly. Our plan calls for us to upgrade a couple of servers and then take a period of time to evaluate the set up and handle any problems that might arise. We may repeat this process on another couple of servers until we feel comfortable with the set up and upgrade procedure. At that point we will begin upgrading the remaining servers in larger numbers.

We are tentatively scheduling to begin this process next week (March 2 – March 7) by upgrading a couple of servers to Apache 2.2 and then evaluating the process. The upgrade process will require Apache to be taken down while it is rebuilt. I am going to allot for an hour of downtime, but I think the downtime will actually be much less. During this downtime you will not be able to access your website, but other services such as e-mail will not be affected. I don’t have an exact schedule regarding this upgrade but I am planning to do it during the early morning (CST) hours, likely between 12AM and 4AM, so as to minimize the affect with this downtime. Accounts that will be part of the upgrade that we have tentatively scheduled for next week will be receiving an e-mail regarding this.

If you have changed your e-mail address I encourage you to update your contact information with us so that you can be notified of changes and upgrades such as this. To update your contact information go to our Account Management Area and click on the Update your Contact Information and complete the form.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns regarding this upgrade please feel free to contact our support team.

Thank You
Scott

We are planning to have all of our servers rebooted this week (February 17 – February 23). The reboot is necessary to perform a security check on the servers as a result of the recent server exploits that have been affecting servers throughout the webhosting industry. We don’t anticipate any problems, but we want to perform these reboots just to be sure. The reboots should happen in the late evening hours or early morning hours. We don’t have an exact timetable for each server as it just depends on how quickly we can perform these security checks and reboots, we will likely span these reboots across multiple evenings. Downtime associated with each reboot should not exceed 15 minutes and would probably be closer to 5 minutes.

Steven