[Apache2] Completed Apache Upgrades
The Apache 2.2 server upgrades have been completed on all of our shared hosting servers. I will now be focusing my attention on optimizing Apache on these servers so that they will operate in the most efficient manner. This will involve organizing the servers, researching the best options, and doing tests. I will also be focusing on upgrading Apache for our dedicated server owners.
All-in-all I thought the Apache upgrades went very smoothly, much better than I anticipated. The only real problems we experienced was the last server to be upgraded on Thursday night. We ran into some problems because there were some typos in the configuration files. This led to a little longer downtime than anticipated, but once the typos were sorted out the upgrade went smoothly.
If you are a dedicated server owner, be looking for an e-mail from our staff within the next few weeks, perhaps as early as this coming week, about upgrading your server to Apache 2.2.
Scott
[General] New Backup System
We have received a small number of issues being raised about slowness and sluggishness of accounts during the late night and early morning hours. This is due to the backup process that is running on all of our servers. Our backup process runs during these hours because it makes more sense to run the backups during the time when the servers are less active. The servers receive fewer visitors during the overnight hours than they do during the daytime hours.
All of our servers run a nightly backup process to back up accounts. Most of the servers split this task up throughout the week in different methods. We don’t specifically advertise our backup system because we feel that in doing so users will be less inclined to keep their own backups. It is always a good idea to have your own personal, up-to-date, backup of your account! The backups that we created are intended to be use in disaster recovery, for example a hard drive failure. But again, you really should not depend on us as your sole backup, you should have a personal backup copy of your website stored on your personal computer.
With all of that being said, I have made some adjustments to the way that the backup process runs on all of our servers. I am going to try out these changes for about a week and see if there are any noticeable performance gains or any problems.
Scott
[Apache2] Continuing the upgrades
We plan to continue the Apache 2.2 server upgrades tonight and across the next few weeks. We are not writing the affected accounts any more because the upgrade goes very smoothly. We have upgraded a few servers to use Apache 2.2 and I can’t think of any support tickets we have received concerning the upgrade or the downtime associated with the upgrade. We will at least try this set up and see what kind of responses we receive.
Right now, I would like to have all of our shared hosting servers upgraded to Apache 2.2 by the first of May. I think this is very achievable, but I have also been in this business long enough to know that setting hard deadlines can be detrimental to the quality of service that is given. So while I am hoping to have this set of upgrades completed by May 1st, I am not going to cut corners just to reach that deadline.
As always your feedback is appreciated.
Scott
[General] Kernel Upgrades
I am going to be doing kernel upgrades on all of our servers this afternoon. This will result in reboots for all of our servers. The reboots mean that your account may be offline for about 15 minutes while the servers come back up. The kernel upgrades don’t really fix any major security concerns, I just believe that it is best to stay on top of new kernel upgrades just in case there are undisclosed concerns.
Scott
[Apache2] Apache 2 Upgrade Round 2 Complete
The Apache 2 upgrade that we scheduled for this week has been completed. Everything once again went smooth with this upgrade. We will monitor the servers and any input from our clients concerning this upgrade and then will proceed further with rolling out this upgrade across all of our servers.
As we head into April and because we are not seeing any problems with these upgrades we may begin to speed up upgrade schedule meaning that we may be upgrading more servers within a given week. We are not receiving any complaints regarding the upgrade or any effects of this upgrade and as a result we will likely forgo sending out specific e-mails to the affected accounts.
Scott
[Apache2] Apache 2 Upgrade Round 2
The Apache 2 upgrade we did a couple of weeks ago seems to have gone over very smoothly. We have not had any problems reported because of that upgrade. As a result we are going to proceed with the second round of server upgrades.
The second round of upgrades will be scheduled for March 24 through March 29. Again the upgrades will be done during the early morning hours, probably between 12AM and 4AM CDT. Downtime for each server is expected to be right at 1 hour. For this second round of upgrades we will be performing this upgrade on two servers. Users on these servers that will be affected by this upgrade will receive an e-mail notice regarding this upgrade later this week.
Please be sure that you have updated contact information on file with us! You need to be sure that your e-mail address you have on file with us is up-to-date and and address that you check regularly. If your e-mail address we have on file is outdated then we will have no way of contacting you. We have a lot of e-mail addresses on file that are no longer active, but we have no way of knowing what e-mail address you use. To update your contact information visit our Account Management Area and click the Update your Contact Information link.
We will again re-evaluate the situation after we do this round of Apache upgrades. It looks like we may do a third round of upgrades after this upgrade. Just stay tuned to this blog for more information concerning the Apache 2 upgrades.
Scott
[Apache2] Apache 2.2 Upgrade
We finished upgrading the two servers from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.2 early Friday morning. We only upgraded two servers so that we can test the procedure and it is also easier to handle support related requests on a smaller scale. The upgrade procedure actually went a lot more smoothly than I figured it would. There were a couple of complications regarding the procedure but these were easily rectified. I was really surprised as to how easy this upgrade went. We’ve only received a couple of support request regarding the upgrade and those were tied to the complications that we have already resolved. I am going to monitor the situation for the next week or so before I do another round of upgrades.
The servers that were affected by this upgrade were written specifically. If you had an account on one of these servers you should have received a notice before the upgrade detailing the upgrade. We did receive a lot of bounce messages when we sent out these notices. I encourage everyone to please be sure that your contact information with us is up-to-date. If we have an outdated e-mail address on file for your account, we’re not going to have any way to contact you regarding issues like this.
If you were affected by this upgrade and you are experiencing problems please be sure to contact our support team so that they can investigate the issue. We are wanting to know if there are any major issues regarding this upgrade before proceeding too far with the upgrade.
Scott
[General] Horde re-enabled
The issue regarding Horde has been resolved and Horde is once again available to everyone. If you experience any problems, please submit a support request.
Steven
[General] Horde disabled
We have temporarily disabled Horde webmail across all of our servers as a security precaution. We have learnt through a security bulletin from cPanel that there is an exploit on the Internet that is affecting Horde. The cPanel developers are working on developing a patch for this issue. They have advised that all webhosts disable Horde to prevent the vulnerability from causing problems on the servers. This is the advice that we are following and this is why Horde has been disabled.
I don’t know when the patch will be rolled out, hopefully it will not take too long. However for the sake of security we decided to follow cPanel’s advice and disable Horde for the time being until this issue can be sorted out.
All of your e-mail and Horde settings will remain intact. Nothing has been lost. You can continue to use Squirrelmail for webmail. Once the issue with Horde is resolved we will re-enable Horde on the servers and you will again have access to Horde.
Steven
[Apache2] Apache 2.2 Upgrade Notes
We are working on plans to upgrade all of our servers to the newer Apache system, Apache 2.2. Currently our servers are running off of the Apache 1.3 system. Apache 1.3 has served us very well over the years, but Apache 2.2 is becoming the defacto standard in the webhosting community and it has really matured a lot since its first release back in December of 2005.
Almost all of the new features in Apache 2.2 are backend oriented. End users themselves won’t notice much of a difference. There may be some performance increases as the code has been optimized over the years to handle data better. The main reason for the upgrade to Apache 2.2 is so that we can bring our hosting packages in line with the rest of the webhosting community. A lot of webhosts have been running Apache 2.2 for several months and there have been no reported problems regarding the new system. The Apache group will eventually end support for Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.2 is the new direction that the group is taking.
We are going to be handling this upgrade very slowly. Our plan calls for us to upgrade a couple of servers and then take a period of time to evaluate the set up and handle any problems that might arise. We may repeat this process on another couple of servers until we feel comfortable with the set up and upgrade procedure. At that point we will begin upgrading the remaining servers in larger numbers.
We are tentatively scheduling to begin this process next week (March 2 - March 7) by upgrading a couple of servers to Apache 2.2 and then evaluating the process. The upgrade process will require Apache to be taken down while it is rebuilt. I am going to allot for an hour of downtime, but I think the downtime will actually be much less. During this downtime you will not be able to access your website, but other services such as e-mail will not be affected. I don’t have an exact schedule regarding this upgrade but I am planning to do it during the early morning (CST) hours, likely between 12AM and 4AM, so as to minimize the affect with this downtime. Accounts that will be part of the upgrade that we have tentatively scheduled for next week will be receiving an e-mail regarding this.
If you have changed your e-mail address I encourage you to update your contact information with us so that you can be notified of changes and upgrades such as this. To update your contact information go to our Account Management Area and click on the Update your Contact Information and complete the form.
If you have any comments, questions, or concerns regarding this upgrade please feel free to contact our support team.
Thank You
Scott
-
Find It
-
Recently Written
-
Categories
-
Monthly Archives
-
Links
-
RSS Feeds
RSS
