Empowering Media: Customer Service Blog http://www.supportem.com/blog Customers can get the most current information available about outages maintenance, or other known issues. Articles of related interest are also posted here. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:17:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en Version control support http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/185 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/185#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:16:18 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=185 To aid in development best practices, we’ve added many of popular version control utilities.  Any server/VPS that runs the DirectAdmin control panel automatically includes the addition. We’ve added the following version control utilities:

Unfortunately, Subversion and Git are not available on any CentOS 3.9 install.  If you want version control software for any other server type, please contact support.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/185/feed Ruby on Rails upgrades http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/184 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/184#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:06:09 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=184 On July 2nd, 9AM EST, Ruby on Rails and all support libraries will be upgraded to the latest versions.  This applies to any shared hosting, reseller or any existing customer already using RoR.

For the curious, the gem updates are as follows:

  • actionmailer (2.1.0)
  • actionpack (2.1.0)
  • activerecord (2.1.0)
  • activeresource (2.1.0)
  • activesupport (2.1.0)
  • capistrano (2.4.3)
  • fcgi (0.8.7)
  • mongrel (1.1.5)
  • mysql (2.7)
  • rails (2.1.0)
  • rake (0.8.1)

If you want any additional Ruby gems installed, please create a support ticket.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/184/feed Upgrading all VPS nodes http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/183 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/183#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:19:38 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=183 On Saturday June 27th 2008 at 10-11 PM EDT we will upgrade all VPS nodes to CentOS 5.2.  This will require downtime for all nodes and the VPSes on each node.  Downtime should be no longer than 15 min per node.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/183/feed All HostASite.com plans upgraded http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/181 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/181#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:50:30 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=181 To celebrate our 8th anniversary, all HostASite.com plans have been upgraded.  Disk space, bandwidth and E-mails have all been increased, but with the same pricing. More details can be found on “The Dev Null Blog“.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/181/feed CentOS 5.2 now available http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/182 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/182#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:50:22 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=182 Any customer running a HostCube unmanaged VPS can upgrade at any time.  Before rebooting, please contact support to upgrade your Xen configuration.

Release Notes can be found here:

http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.2/

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/182/feed SSH key login only available http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/180 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/180#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:32:40 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=180 This option is available for any Managed HostCube VPS or managed server customer, and is not available on shared or reseller hosting. Enabling this option forces all SSH/SFTP logins to use SSH key authentication only. SSH keys are much more secure than keyboard interactive and should be used by every customer. SSH clients like Putty, SecureCRT and Mac’s terminal fully support SSH keys. Not only are SSH keys more secure, but if you have multiple accounts with us your login is automatic to every account.

For those not familiar with how to setup SSH keys please visit:

http://www.sshkeychain.org/mirrors/SSH-with-Keys-HOWTO/

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html

Shared or reseller hosting customers can still use SSH Keys to login and is the recommended method. On those servers we do not force SSH key only logins to accommodate customers who do not use them.

If you want this feature enabled please contact support.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/180/feed Updated SSL certificate for SMTP/POP3/IMAP http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/179 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/179#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:09:23 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=179 We’ve updated the self signed certificate for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP on all servers who are not resellers. It will now show our information in the certificate, instead of generic information. This change was suggested by a customer and makes the cert slightly more secure. Any dedicated customer who wants a real SSL cert to protect their incoming and/or outgoing Email, please contact us. Many Email applications complain when the certificate is self signed and the only method around this is by purchasing a valid certificate.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/179/feed Updated FTP/SSH auto block service http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/178 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/178#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:12:04 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=178 As mentioned previously, we auto block FTP and SSH attacks. Overall it has been working great and within two months blocked over 800 unique IP addresses. One issue we’ve discovered is many FTP clients try to login with ‘anonymous’ user first and then use the username/password specified in the FTP client. Anonymous FTP is something used years ago and shouldn’t be used today. Our service unfortunately has blocked a few legitimate users. So since we do not allow anonymous FTP, we’ve increased the amount of bad passwords for ‘anonymous’ and also separated them from other bad logins. This should prevent blocking legitimate users. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/178/feed Limiter added to vacation and auto response Emails http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/177 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/177#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:12:03 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=177 Per request of a few customers, all vacation and auto response Emails are limited to once every 24 hours, per E-mail address.  This will prevent mail loops, or people who constantly send Emails while you are on vacation.  Great also for people who subscribe to mailing lists.  This feature will be deployed for all brands.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/177/feed View software updates per server/VPS http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/176 http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/176#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 19:32:53 +0000 Larry http://www.supportem.com/blog/?p=176 Want to see what was updated on your server/VPS? If so view the log file that’s available on every managed server/VPS:

/var/log/updates

While we still will post blogs or create tickets for major upgrades, any minor updates will be logged to this file. While we have many applications, services and config files reporting to this file, we still do not have everything yet configured. In the coming weeks and months all updates will be reported to this file. The file is rotated weekly.

If something isn’t working correctly and you think it’s because of a change we made please create a support ticket. Eventually we will create a method to either securely RSS feed this report or a method to Email customers daily reports of server changes.

]]> http://www.supportem.com/blog/article/176/feed