Shell Access Limited

July 23, 2007

Birdhouse has always enabled shell access for all users by default, primarily to promote SFTP usage. However, this practice has become untenable, primarily because too many users opt for easily guessable passwords. Effective immediately, Birdhouse grants shell access only to selected users, after a trust relationship has been established. Please contact us to request shell [...]

Performance Improvements

July 19, 2007

Our conversion to cPanel 11 is complete, and we’ve done a ton of work over the past few weeks to improve server performance, bring down loads, and further secure the server. Please enjoy our new, improved Birdhouse!

Tip for IMAP Users

June 28, 2007

If you use Apple’s Mail.app with IMAP for your email and you’ve noticed that you sometimes get errors “Could not save Draft,” and that your Sent emails are no longer stored in the usual Sent box, try this tip: Go to Preferences, Advanced, and use INBOX as your IMAP Path Prefix. Problem solved! If you [...]

Maildir Conversion Complete

June 23, 2007

We have completed the conversion of mbox mail directories to maildir format. This change should be largely invisible to users. However, if you have subscribed to mailboxes in SquirrelMail or Horde, you will need to re-subscribe them. The impact of this conversion should be faster POP/IMAP mail checking, and a resulting reduction of load on [...]

cPanel 11 Upgrade

June 23, 2007

We’ve upgraded cPanel for all user accounts to version 11, which includes many security fixes and feature improvements. This upgrade also paves the way for our pending upgrade to Apache 2.2, and will allow us to offer Ruby on Rails to customers soon. Read more about cPanel 11 here.

PHP Upgraded

June 22, 2007

PHP is now at the most recent version available. We’ve also disabled a few PHP functions for security reasons. If these changes affect your operation, please contact us.

Spam Uptick

June 22, 2007

Apologies for the uptick in spam over the past few days following a seemingly innocent perl upgrade. We believe we have things back under control now and spam filters are working properly again.

Switch Replacement

March 26, 2007

We had approximately 30 minutes of downtime today as the datacenter did an emergency switch replacement upstream from our server. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Outgoing Mail

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 [...]

Apache Failure

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.