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.
August 10, 2006
We experienced some unscheduled downtime this afternoon as our datacenter moved our hosting environment to an equivalent server. We were supposed to have been exempt from that move, as we already had a planned upgrade in the works for Monday.
Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.
August 7, 2006
Those of you using Roundcube webmail will be pleased to know we’ve upgraded our Roundcube installation to the latest version, with a bunch of refinements and improvements. If you don’t know the address to Roundcube and want to give it a shot, contact us.
August 3, 2006
PHP has been recompiled with the pspell libraries, which means users can now use things like Visual Spellcheck for WordPress.
July 19, 2006
For users who want/need it, we have installed the Subversion (svn) command-line toolset. Note that this applies only to client-side svn access, e.g. for developers who require access to external svn repositories. We do not currently offer svn hosting.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
June 7, 2006
The SSL certificate on gong.birdhouse.org is now self-signed, meaning you may see interesting messages from your browser when accessing webmail or cPanel (or from your mail client if accessing gong.birdhouse.org rather than mail.yourdomain.com). The self-signed certificate is perfectly valid and secure; you may want to tell your browser or mail client to accept the cert […]