June 22, 2008
While our SSL certificate is currently valid and current, the server suddenly started handing out a self-signed certificate instead. This means users will likely be seeing “untrusted certificate” warnings from their web browsers (when connecting to webmail or cpanel) or from their email clients when using POP or IMAP connections. We’re currently working with the […]
April 21, 2008
We have completed the process of upgrading Apache and PHP to the latest versions, and everything appears to be running normally. In rare instances, some home-brew PHP scripts may break in unexpected ways. These breakages are generally quite easy to fix - contact us and we’ll take a look.
Virtually all modern 3rd-party / open source […]
April 17, 2008
We’re planning to upgrade our installation of Apache to v. 2.2 and PHP to 5.2.5 on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20. After much research, we have concluded that we can do this safely without risk of breaking any existing customer scripts or software. If you find that any functionality on your site is not […]
February 14, 2008
On customer request, emacs is now installed and working (vi and pico were already present). Go for it!
February 6, 2008
Quick update: Since migrating from RedHat 9 to CentOS 4.6 and removing MailScanner a few weeks ago, load averages on Birdhouse servers have been reduced almost by a factor three. Performance has been excellent, and all systems are humming along nicely.
January 12, 2008
SpamAssassin fell over this morning and spam is finding its way into customer mailboxes. We’re working with the datacenter on a fix. Please stand by.
Update: This issue was fixed by around 6:00 PDT. The spam flow was due to a small - and elusive - misconfiguration in SpamAssassin which neither we nor our datacenter […]
January 8, 2008
On Tuesday, Jan. 8, at 7pm Pacific time, we’ll be undertaking a major technical upgrade of our hosting platform:
Red Hat 9 → CentOS 4
PHP 4 → PHP 5
MySQL 4 → MySQL 5
We anticipate up to an hour of downtime, though it should be less than that total. The upgrade will be […]
January 5, 2008
As a result of the recent removal of MailScanner from Birdhouse, spam configuration controls in cPanel have changed, as has the way the subject lines of suspected spam are marked.
Our Configure Spam Controls FAQ has been updated accordingly. If you were maintaining any server-side spam filters or rules, please see the FAQ, then log into […]
January 5, 2008
In addition to the enormous mail backlog that landed on our doorstep last week, we simultaneously hit an additional snag: An update of perl to v5.8.8 broke MailScanner and could not be fixed without a major operating system upgrade. But the operating system upgrade cannot be undertaken with MailScanner installed - Catch 22 (documentation on […]
January 2, 2008
Birdhouse is currently importing a very large volume of mail for a new customer. The import process is, unfortunately, consuming a lot of resources and is slowing some services down noticeably. We apologize for the inconvenience; normal system performance should be restored sometime during the day.
Update Jan. 2, 2008: Making progress — we’ve […]