Double “dot” Attachments

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 disable it again in the future.

Heavy Customer Moved

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. [...]

Mail Queue

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.

MailScanner

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.

Roundcube in cPanel

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, [...]

cPanel X2 Theme

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.

Upgrade Complete

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 [...]

Upgrade, Scheduled Downtime

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.

Downtime

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.

Roundcube Updated

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.