Birdhouse Hosting News and Updates

Note: In the event of a system outage, this News page may not be available. Our status system, however, lives on a completely independent server and will always be available. Please bookmark status.birdhousehosting.com.

New Hosting Plans, Rates, Bandwidth Offerings

Birdhouse is pleased to announce our new Plan A account, optimized for student budgets and hosting needs. The Plan A account is available to students everywhere (with proof of enrollment, if we don’t already know you), and is valid until one year after graduation.

We’ve also reduced rates slightly for our other hosting plans, increased bandwidth and storage allocations across the board, and increased the number of plan features available to all users.

Hosting Site Redesigned

To celebrate our recent upgrades to CentOS, Apache 2, and PHP 5,  the launch of a new specialized student hosting plan,  and reduced hosting rates and increased bandwidth offerings for all users, Birdhouse  is proud to launch the brand new Birdhouse Hosting web site you’re looking at now.

The entire site is built on WordPress, and features a newly integrated News section.  The fancy navigation menu animation unfortunately doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but degrades nicely and is still functional for brain-dead browsers.

Please let us know what you think!

Apache and PHP Upgrades Complete

We have completed the process of upgrading Apache and PHP to the latest versions (Apache 2.2.x and PHP 5.2.x), and everything appears to be running normally. In rare instances, some home-brew PHP scripts may break in unexpected ways. These breakages are generally quite easy to fix – contact us and we’ll take a look.

Virtually all modern 3rd-party / open source PHP applications will run fine under PHP5 without modification.

Apache / PHP Upgrades Scheduled

We’re planning to upgrade our installation of Apache to v. 2.2 and PHP to 5.2.5 on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20. After much research, we have concluded that we can do this safely without risk of breaking any existing customer scripts or software. If you find that any functionality on your site is not working as expected, please contact us, and we’ll get things working quickly.

emacs installed

On customer request, emacs is now installed and working (vi and pico were already present).

Go forth and edit!

Loads Are Light

Quick update: Since migrating from RedHat 9 to CentOS 4.6 and removing MailScanner a few weeks ago, load averages on Birdhouse servers have been reduced almost by a factor three. Performance has been excellent, and all systems are humming along nicely.

(Optimal load levels are below 1.0)

Major System Update Scheduled

On Tuesday, Jan. 8, at 7pm Pacific time, we’ll be undertaking a major technical upgrade of our hosting platform:

• Red Hat 9 → CentOS 4
• PHP 4 → PHP 5
• MySQL 4 → MySQL 5

We anticipate up to an hour of downtime, though it should be less than that total. The upgrade will be handled by an automated script, painstakingly written and watched over by our rockin’ datacenter. The process is well-tested and we do not anticipate any major issues, though it’s possible some minor things may crop up. Please let us know immediately if anything’s not working for you after the upgrade.

Update: The operating system upgrade went extremely well; downtime was less than 30 minutes. We had a few loose ends to tie up: Missing Smarty libs, some SSL issues, but everything’s getting ironed out quickly. SSL email on gong.birdhouse.org may not be fixed before morning.

SpamAssassin kept running, but the setting that enables SA for each user automatically had not made it across the migration. Spam was allowed through the system during this period. Spam settings were re-enabled a couple of hours after the migration was completed.

Unfortunately, the PHP / Apache / MySQL upgrades may have to wait for another day. We’re still running the previous AMP stack, and will tackle this portion of the upgrade soon.

Update 2: SSL certs for POP/IMAP access are working again, and we’ve ironed out all known issues (all were fairly minor; most users didn’t notice that anything had changed).

We’ll post an update on the AMP upgrade plans soon.

Spam Controls Have Changed

As a result of the recent removal of MailScanner from Birdhouse, spam configuration controls in cPanel have changed, as has the way the subject lines of suspected spam are marked.

Our Configure Spam Controls FAQ has been updated accordingly. If you were maintaining any server-side spam filters or rules, please see the FAQ, then log into cPanel and take a look to make sure your mail is being handled the way you want it to be.

MailScanner Removed

In addition to the enormous mail backlog that landed on our doorstep last week, we simultaneously hit an additional snag: An update of perl to v5.8.8 broke MailScanner and could not be fixed without a major operating system upgrade. But the operating system upgrade cannot be undertaken with MailScanner installed – Catch 22 (documentation on this issue is here). As a result, we had an enormous backlog of mail that simply couldn’t be released quickly.

The likelihood of these two events happening simultaneously is like lightning hitting twice in the same spot. Guess we’re just lucky .

MailScanner has been removed from Birdhouse and replaced with the original (and more straightforward) cPanel + SpamAssassin system. This change will result in both lighter loads and easier troubleshooting of our mail system in the event of any future problems.

When MailScanner was first installed, it offered a lot of functionality not offered by cPanel + SpamAssassin alone. But with the move to cPanel 11, enough new features have been added that we no longer need MailScanner. Removing MailScanner also clears the path for us to move from the current operating system to CentOS 4.x in the near future.

Server Upgrade

We experienced a 30-minute outage today as we upgraded to a faster server with more memory and storage. Thanks for your patience! The upgrade went flawlessly, and load averages are at their lowest levels ever. Onwards and upwards.