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 logs across the server for bad behavior and adding offending IPs to its deny list. We also plan some deeper customization of these rules based on logs from blog comment spam attacks.
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 […]
April 27, 2006
After polling Birdhouse users, we’ve learned that no one is using Webalyzer web traffic stats often enough to care whether they’re present or not. Because Webalyzer consumes high amounts of disk and CPU activity, we’ve made the decision to disable it. The much-superior awstats is now the only web traffic analysis software available.
March 10, 2006
We’ve just come back online after an unscheduled 30-minute service outage — the datacenter rebooted a master server, which entailed a lengthy rebuild of disk quota tables. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
March 2, 2006
On customer request, the Image::Magick perl module has been installed site-wide (useful for perl scripts that do on-the-fly image resizing and other tasks).
February 23, 2006
We are experiencing high load averages today, as our datacenter moves a few high-resource-usage customers off of our physical host. Loads should return to normal by the end of the day.
January 27, 2006
We have increased the monthly bandwidth limit for plan levels B (from 5 to 15 GBs) and C (from 20 to 30 GBs).
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 […]
January 19, 2006
On request, the command-line mail client pine has been updated to version 4.64, which flags messages from users not already in the address book.
January 19, 2006
To bring the long-form mailbox quota warnings into line with the short-form system warnings, we’ve changed the threshold from 85% to 80%. Users will now receive warnings earlier, which will provide more wiggle room and leave overhead for receiving large attachments, etc.