We hope to begin rolling out new cPanel updates on our servers this week. We have been running a new version of cPanel on some of our test environments for the past week and have not noticed any problems. The next step is to roll this out to all of our servers.

This new cPanel release will bring about some new features and changes. We will detail these in a later post.

Steven

All users are encouraged to update their contact information in their control panel and keep it updated with valid information.

To update your contact information log into your control panel by going to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel

(Obviously, change yourdomain.com to your actual domain name).

Then click on the Update Contact Info link that is in the Preferences box. The icon will look like:

There you will find two fields that you can enter an e-mail address into. You do not have to have a secondary e-mail address for contact, it is just there in case you want to enter multiple addresses.

In the fields labeled:

Email address that you can be contacted at.
If you wish to provide a second email address to receive notifications, enter it here.

You can enter a valid e-mail address.

If you ever change your e-mail contact address then you need to update this information. Keeping your e-mail contact information up-to-date insures that you stay up-to-date with regards to your account.

Why keep this information updated?

Along with staying up-to-date with happenings on your account, keeping your contact information up-to-date can be important so that you are notified of potential issues on your account.

We have been testing an FTP login notification system that will use this information to keep you notified. We will have a separate post concerning this system. But the general idea around this system is that we have had a lot of accounts compromised lately due to FTP hacking, the FTP login notification system will keep you appraised of FTP logins on your account and will use this contact information to inform you.

As always, if you have questions concerning this you can discuss this with our support staff by submitting a support ticket at:

http://www.amshelp.com

Steven

We are seeing a lot of e-mails from users concerning the outdated Fantastico installed scripts that users have been receiving.

Users are receiving these notices because they at one time installed the stated script with Fantastico from within their control panel.

We are seeing a lot of e-mails from individuals who have upgraded their scripts manually and are wondering why they are still receiving these notices.

To explain this, you have to understand that Fantastico is a script library. It is an entity in itself. If you install a script with Fantastico, you are expected to keep the script updated through Fantastico. This is the only way that Fantastico can be made aware of what version of the script you have installed.

Fantastico keeps a database of what is installed, where it is installed, and what version is installed. When you use Fantastico to install a script, it adds this to its database.

WordPress was installed in /home/user/public_html/wordpress and is version 2.7.1

When you manually update one of these scripts, this internal database is not updated. If you update this WordPress install to version 2.8.4, but do it manually, then the Fantastico internal database still thinks you have version 2.7.1 installed.

When Fantastico runs its check and looks for outdated installs, it uses this internal database to determine the versions of the software installed. So even though you may have manually updated your script to the latest version, Fantastico is not going to know about this and is going to think that you still have an outdated script.

What can be done about this?

Contact support if this affects you. We can remove your script install from the Fantastico internal database so that you will not receive the notices any more. You won’t be able to update the script with Fantastico any more, but if you have already manually updated the script, it is likely that Fantastico will not be able to update your script, without messing something up. This is because of the version mismatch in its system.

PLEASE NOTE: It is highly recommended that if you install a script with Fantastico that you keep the script updated with Fantastico. This may mean that it takes a few days longer to get script updates applied to your script. If you are really into following the development of a script and wish to always have the latest version of the script installed we highly recommend that you manually install the script instead of using Fantastico for the initial install.

Steven

It seems I made an error when searching for accounts that are using PHP4. Turns out that there are slightly more than a handful of accounts that are still using PHP4.

PHP4 has been re-enabled on all of our servers. We will be writing each of these accounts individually and we will revisit the disabling of PHP4 probably sometime next week. If I happen to find any server that is not hosting any PHP4 accounts, PHP4 may be disabled on those servers.

I do apologize for any inconvenience this disabling may have caused users that were not identified by our search.

Scott

I have gone through all of our servers and I checked for PHP4 usage. I really did not find that many accounts that were still using PHP4. Only a handful of accounts appear to still be using PHP4 and only on a couple of our servers. If you were found to be using PHP4 you should have received an e-mail notice from us.

Because of the low turn out with PHP4, I am going to be disabling PHP4 on all of the servers that don’t appear to be serving up PHP4.

PLEASE NOTE: If you received a notice about PHP4 on your account, then you won’t be affected by this. At least not yet. Right now, I am only disabling PHP4 on servers where we did not detect any PHP4 usage.

The purpose of this is to find out if there are any other accounts that may still be using PHP4 that we are unaware of. If you see an INTERNAL SERVER ERROR when access your PHP scripts, then this likely indicates that you were using PHP4. Please open a support ticket to have this investigated.

Scott