March 21, 2007
The datacenter is currently working on an issue with outgoing mail through birdhouse SMTP. Will post an update here when this has been resolved.
Update, 6:00 pm PDT: Mail services have been restored and no mail has been lost. We’re still working through some things with the datacenter, but customers should not be affected. Thanks for […]
February 12, 2007
Apache has failed on our main web server, and is not wanting to come back up. We are investigating. Stand by for information.
Update: Apache is running again. A subtle config syntax issue caused the failure. Total downtime was around 15 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.
January 13, 2007
We’ve made a configuration change to the mail server to allow double “dot” extensions on attachments, e.g. “filename.sfh.doc” through to users. These were previously rejected by the virus scanner, since they sometimes represent attempts to disguise viruses as other filetypes. If the change results in more viruses getting through to users, we may have to […]
November 28, 2006
We believe that most of the brief mail outages over the past two weeks were caused by very heavy loads placed on our server by one of our most popular users being hit by incessant floods of comment spam. This customer has been moved off of gong.birdhouse.org and onto a dedicated server of his own. […]
October 28, 2006
Our mail queue became backed up today for several hours due to the MailScan daemon not starting up properly after a cPanel update. No mail was lost, though users will have experienced late delivery. We apologize for the inconvenience and will take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen with future cPanel updates.
October 16, 2006
We’ve upgraded the user-level spam configuration controls by installing MailScanner into cPanel. Users can now control spam thresholds per-domain rather than per-account, and can set separate thresholds for low-scoring spam (keep but tag as spam) and high-scoring spam (delete at the server level). Notes and usage instructions are available in our Spam Control FAQ.
October 10, 2006
Webmail users will now notice an additional webmail option at yourdomain.com/webmail. Roundcube is an up-and-coming “Ajax” based webmail client we prefer in many ways to Squirrel. However, please understand that Roundcube is offered as an experimental mail system, and may be removed or modified in the future.
This Roundcube installation is in addition to our older, […]
September 26, 2006
If your cPanel looks different, it’s because we’ve returned to using the default X2 theme rather than rvskins. This move was made to achieve greater compatibility with cPanel add-ons that assume the default skin, and because the default skin is easier for new users to navigate.
August 14, 2006
Our transition to faster server hardware is complete, and went flawlessly. Birdhouse experienced less than 30 minutes downtime and all services and sites came back up without incident. Users should notice significantly peppier performance from cPanel, webmail, Movable Type, and other CPU-intensive applications. Load averages have decreased on average by a factor of 2x to […]
August 11, 2006
Birdhouse will experience approximately 30 minutes of downtime Monday, Aug. 14, starting at 8 p.m. PDT / 11 p.m. EDT.
Our environment is being moved to a faster server with more available resources, with the intention of reducing load averages and making things like cPanel, webmail, and perl-based systems like Movable Type snappier.