Data Center Outage
December 27, 2007
The datacenter housing our server is currently experiencing a network outage due to a routing problem. They expect to have all services back online shortly.
Update: Two minutes later… problem solved
Status Server Moved
September 26, 2007
Welcome to the new Birdhouse Status Server. It’s exactly like the old status server, but relocated to a machine completely unconnected to anything else run by Birdhouse. Therefore, it should now be easy to get up-to-date information on Birdhouse systems even in the unlikely event of a server or DNS outage on our main machines. Please […]
Server Upgrade
September 16, 2007
We experienced a 30-minute outage today as we upgraded to a faster server with more memory and storage. Thanks for your patience! The upgrade went flawlessly, and load averages are at their lowest levels ever. Onwards and upwards.
SSL Certificate Renewed
July 30, 2007
We have just renewed and re-installed our GeoTrust SSL certificate, so browsers won’t complain when visiting cPanel or webmail, and mail clients won’t complain about faulty certificates when using POP/IMAP/SMTP. This does not make our services any more or less secure than they were before - it just means that […]
Harvesting Spammy IPs
July 3, 2006
In our ongoing quest to reduce loads on the server, we’ve initiated a program to periodically scan WordPress and MovableType databases for 10 or more comment attempts that are flagged as spam. These IPs are immediately added to the firewall to keep the spammer from exacting any more toll on the server. So far the […]
Unclosed Vim Sessions
July 3, 2006
When shell users open vi/vim sessions and then get disconnected from the internet or close their terminal window, the ghost vim sessions start chewing up a lot of CPU. This is a bug in the way vim is programmed. To keep these sessions from using undue resources on the server, we’re now running a script […]
CSF Firewall
June 27, 2006
As of this evening, we’ve disabled the APF/BFD firewall and replaced it with CSF/LFD. Users should not notice any surface difference. This change was made for two reasons: 1) CSF is totally integrated with cPanel (though users do not have an interface onto it) and 2) It does a much better job of watching various […]
FAQs Updated
January 24, 2006
All Hosting FAQs have been gone over with a fine-toothed comb and updated for the new server environment. Please let us know if you spy anything out of whack. We’ve also added a couple of new FAQs (on using traditional FTP and on managing mail quotas).
We’ve used this opportunity to move the FAQs into the […]
Magpie RSS Parser Installed
November 15, 2005
We’ve installed the Magpie RSS parser server-wide on Birdhouse for web developers interested in including other sites’ RSS feeds on their own sites. Usage instructions are in the new Magpie FAQ.
PHP, Zend, GD updated
November 8, 2005
We’ve updated PHP to version 4.4.1, with Zend Optimizer v2.5.10. We’ve also installed the GD graphics library for PHP, for those of you that can use it.