This is a minor security release.

If you have a Dedicated Server or Linux vserver with us that has phpMyAdmin installed, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest version available for your current operating environment. phpMyAdmin is a common point of attempted entry to servers and old versions with known security vulnerabilities are prime targets.

All our main shared hosting systems have already been upgraded to this latest version, so clients with One Plan accounts (or older packages like Sblog, Vine, Bud & Tree) are already protected with this update.

Please refer to the upcoming PMASA-2012-1 announcement on http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/.

Source: http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=23067

You can follow the phpMyAdmin news RSS feed here:
feed:https://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_projnews.php?group_id=23067&rss_fulltext=1&limit=10

This is a bugfix release.

If you have a Dedicated Server or Linux vserver with us that has phpMyAdmin installed, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest version available for your current operating environment. phpMyAdmin is a common point of attempted entry to servers and old versions with known security vulnerabilities are prime targets.

All our main shared hosting systems have already been upgraded to this latest version, so clients with One Plan accounts (or older packages like Sblog, Vine, Bud & Tree) are already protected with this update.

Source: http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=23067

You can follow the phpMyAdmin news RSS feed here:
feed:https://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_projnews.php?group_id=23067&rss_fulltext=1&limit=10

What’s Changing?

The Google Apps team recently added key features of Postini Message Security directly into the Google Apps control panel. The email features (including compliance footers, restricted email delivery, attachment controls, and more) are comparable to those offered with Google Message Security, and simpler to manage.

As a result, Google is deprecating the Postini Message Security service that is integrated with Google Apps accounts.

What’s Next?

Google are asking all Google Apps customers with integrated Postini Message Security to consolidate their email management settings in Google Apps and to remove Postini from their mail flow.

In the coming months, Google Apps customers will receive notifications from Google with instructions and a deadline for completing this transition for domains on their account.

It is also expected to see lower false positive rates for messages sent within your organization by using only Gmail’s spam filtering capabilities.

Resources:

FAQ: Postini to Google Apps Transition
Step-by-step Transition Guide (you will receive an email when your account is ready to transition)
New email filters in Google Apps: Blog post and setup article

Our first video is a presentation explaining the various options we have available for email service provision, and this can be viewed via YouTube or directly on our website by clicking here.

Amongst other information, this first video provides a good overview of the differences between our own email service and Google Apps for Business Gmail to assist clients in selecting the best email service for their individual needs.

We intend to add more videos in the future covering a whole variety of topics.

Watch this video on YouTube.

If you are an existing customer, please review the information below and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Maintenance window:
Start: Wednesday 1st February 2012 – 21:00 GMT
End: Thursday 2nd February 2012 – 03:00 GMT

You can use the timeanddate.com website to convert this time to your timezone.

Description:
Upgrade of routing within UK data centre (Smartbunker) core network.

Outage risk:
Several short outages could occur during the maintenance window as routing updates.

Reason for work:
To increase resilient backhaul network speed and decommission end of life legacy equipment. To simplify and future proof Internet connectivity at Smartbunker.

In a later maintenance window (within the next 6 to 8 weeks) a second gigabit fibre will be brought live, further enhancing redundancy and resilience in the core network Internet connectivity and completing the process.

Updates:
2nd February 2012 00:10
All is looking very well. Initial testing is showing we’re more than six times faster sending out than was possible yesterday and server monitoring is showing 100% uptime.

3rd February 2012
Confirmation received from the data centre that the whole process went smoothly and completely as planned. The old BT equipment that let them down so badly recently has now been powered off completely forever.

Fantastic job by the UK data centre and I’m sure, a sign of things to come; plans are on track to install another gigabit line around the end of March.

Overnight, we suffered some occasional packet loss with traffic destined for our systems based there (mainly during the early hours of the 4th January).

Engineers at the UK data centre worked into the night to try and rectify the issue, but unfortunately the wind speeds were too dangerous to climb the full 25 metres to the top of the tower. They did however get close enough to confirm the damage.

The climbers were back at first light to repair the damage and realign the communications equipment to fully correct the issue.

We can only apologise for this temporary outage caused by the freak weather conditions yesterday. In the words of one of the engineers attending though; “while the towers and kit is tested and rated upto 120mph winds it would appear one bit of metal had other ideas”!

Our thanks to the engineers who braved the elements and managed to fix this safely in the end.

Please click here to view this article

Our servers are monitored every minute of every day from well over 30 locations around the globe (at the time of writing there are 40 active probe servers).

In the event of an issue with one of our systems, the on call engineers are immediately alerted via SMS text message, email and in some cases iPhone push notifications. In the majority of situations we are already dealing with the issue long before our clients become aware.

We always respond as quickly as humanly possible to this type of event, but obviously we are completely dependant on Internet access ourselves and in some instances, this may be of the mobile variety and so dependant on 3G cellular connections.

To achieve this level of monitoring we use Pingdom, a 3rd party monitoring service provider. This independence is crucial to an effective monitoring system.

As part of this service, we have created a publicly available system status page here:
http://status.ecologicalhosting.com/

The Pingdom service operates completely independently of either data centre we have equipment and systems running in, but the easy to remember link above does rely on our DNS. We have geographically diverse DNS with systems running in the US and the UK, so our name service should always be available, but in the extremely unlikely event that both data centres were offline at the same time, the following link will always work:
http://stats.pingdom.com/mwhnlldpinq9

The information provided on our system status page is live data from the Pingdom monitoring service and we have no control over the presentation of this (i.e. it is the 100% truth of the current situation with our main servers with no time delay).

Mostly, it should be all be showing green with 100% uptime, but like all providers, occasionally there are issues. The system status page key is as follows:

Service up!
99.9% uptime or better (less than 2m downtime)

Service disruption
99.89% – 99.98% uptime (between 2m and 29m downtime)

Service outage
Less than 98% uptime (more than 29m downtime)

All figures are calculated within the current day.

Within the system status page, you can click on a service and find more details about this system.

You can also use the search box at the top of the page to find specific services (e.g. FTP, Shared Web Hosting, Vserver).

The search is also particularly useful to quickly ascertain if there is a system issue or it’s looking more like a data centre networking issue. Search for US or GB to see all systems in just one data centre. If everything is showing as down or with service disruption in the same data centre, then this is almost certainly a data centre networking issue.

This distinction is very important, because whilst we will obviously chase the data centre concerned for information and ETA to fix where possible, data centre outages are completely outside of our direct control and all we would be able to do under these circumstance is apologise for the outage and assure you that we’re on their case.

If it’s an individual service showing an issue, then we are much more likely to be able to assist rapidly and get the problem resolved.

Following customer feedback, we are also using our Twitter feed as a way of diseminating important information, such as live updates regarding extended system events:
https://twitter.com/ecohost

We care immensely about our uptime, it’s our entire business after all, and our target is always 100%, but that said, there is no service provider in the world that can maintain 100% uptime, always, this is an unrealistic expectation.

Even the most scalable, redundant, best specified and best implemented systems in the world from major providers including Sony, Google, Amazon and Twitter, occasionally have service issues as documented in the following article with reference links (many of the outages documented here ran to days of downtime):
http://newtech.about.com/od/cloudcomputing/tp/Cloud-Computing-Major-Service-Outages-In-2011.htm

So a more realistic expectation is that we continuously achieve uptimes in excess of 99.9% over the long term view and to date we have managed this target successfully.

The following information about roles (the client’s responsibilities and those of Ecological Hosting to clients) is also pertinent to this article:
http://www.ecologicalhosting.com/company/policy/roles

As a final note, please also bear in mind that in offering our 100% renewable energy powered services, our choice of data centres is very limited. You can read more information about the data centres we’re currently using here:
http://www.ecologicalhosting.com/company/data-centre

This is a bugfix release with minor security fixes.

If you have a Dedicated Server or Linux vserver with us that has phpMyAdmin installed, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest version available for your current operating environment. phpMyAdmin is a common point of attempted entry to servers and old versions with known security vulnerabilities are prime targets.

All our main shared hosting systems have already been upgraded to this latest version, so clients with One Plan accounts (or older packages like Sblog, Vine, Bud & Tree) are already protected with this update.

Please refer to the upcoming PMASA-2011-19 and PMASA-2011-20 announcements on http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/.

Source: http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=23067&id=305263

You can follow the phpMyAdmin news RSS feed here:
feed:https://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_projnews.php?group_id=23067&rss_fulltext=1&limit=10