PHP4 to PHP5 upgrade – May 26, 2008
PHP4 support was discontinued by the authors as of January, 2008. Lime Daley will be moving everyone to PHP5 this Friday, May 30. We will go through each site to try to make sure it is still working, but depending on what PHP applications you are using, particularly if you wrote it yourself, there might be issues in migrating. There are two temporary solutions that you can use if your code doesn't work in PHP5.
- Rename the affected files with a .php4 extension.
- Add a bit of code to your .htaccess file:
ForceType application/x-httpd-php4
Remember that this is only a temporary measure, as PHP4 does not receive ongoing security updates and bug fixes, and it will be supported less and less as time goes on.
Spam Statistics – May 19, 2008
Statistics update for all of Lime Daley's servers. It is always amazing to me to see how much spam is sent by known spammers, and is trivially easy to throw away. I just checked the current stats, and Lime Daley is on target to reject 2 million spams this year. That doesn't include spams that are more questionable (122 thousand), and will be passed onto the user's spam folders for them to verify that they are spam.
It would be nice to lower the "questionable" emails further, but it is hard to do that and maintain a 0% false positive (where real email is considered spam). I consider real emails that don't get delivered, and worse, don't even get reported to either the sender or the receiver) as completely unacceptable, and so have to put up with the questionable spams being put in a spam folder.
On the other hand, since there are around a thousand email accounts on the servers, that means each person get an average of 122 "questionable" emails in their spam folder each year, which doesn't seem that much of a burden, particularly since lots of people (on competitors' servers) put up with a much higher number than that.
Easier User Administration, Webmail, etc. – May 16, 2008
Lime Daley now supports SSL for all email connections for all customers, if they use their assigned domain name for accessing our servers. Contact the support department for details, but generally, the appropriate name is <your-domain-name>-mail.limedaley.com. This hostname can be used for SSL (and non-SSL, though we recommend SSL for security; TLS is also available) connections for SMTP, POP, IMAP as well as webmail and configuration by going to https://<your-domain-name>-mail.limedaley.com.
A wild-card SSL certificate makes this all possible, and avoids the warning messages typical at other providers when using self-signed certificates.
Password Reset For Some Email Accounts – April 22, 2008
Network Maintenance – April 20, 2008
Maintenance Update – April 05, 2008
I had hoped that this blog would be used for more interesting things other than outage reports, but so far, that hasn't happened.
This morning a circuit breaker blew at the ISP, causing one of the servers (containing one customer) to go down for 30 minutes. The power switches are probably going to be reorganized today, and all of the servers might be rebooted at some point, not exactly sure what the status is at this point. If that outage occurs, it should be for a minute or two for the affected servers.
The good news is that the last outage was in August of 2006, so we are doing pretty well. I recently discovered a company that is reporting statistics on the uptime of our first server, so that is kind of neat. They don't appear to check very often, so I am not sure if the statistics can be counted as that accurate, but for now, having them report 100% uptime shows that I am not making it up.
Bandwidth Limits Removed – December 14, 2007
I discovered only yesterday (despite suspicions for a month or two) that when the network was switched a while ago, bandwidth caps had been placed by our ISP. They have been removed, and I was able to hit 80Mbps incoming and outgoing - I don't have a faster connection anywhere else with which to test it. But, for those of you who had noticed the previous 1Mbps cap and not complained, or figured it was your connection, you can be happier now. By the way, this announcement blog has been less useful than I originally imagined, so I doubt there are many folks that read it, but perhaps as the business grows, there will be more information here.
I also suppose it is a good thing that there aren't more announcements here. It has been over a year since our last outage announcement, and there haven't been any unplanned outages in that time. I rebooted a couple times last Saturday to upgrade the kernels and the network, so all of our customers would have seen a couple minutes of outage, and a couple customers would have seen a twenty minute outage (one machine decided to do a file system check during one of the reboots, causing it to take a long time to reboot). I am not particularly happy about that, and most of the customers only saw a couple minutes of outage this year, so it is a lot better than a lot of other hosting places I hear about (and gain customers from).
First Outage... – August 28, 2006
Five minutes isn't all that much, but isn't really acceptable for me. So, I will probably move the machine to my other host, who has redundant internet connections, and is supposed to be immune from this sort of thing. (The other provider does have a planned maintenance outage for one of its providers in a couple days, so it will be interesting to see if the redundant part really works.
Lime Daley Logos – March 28, 2006
Transparent logo:
Transparent logo with border:
White background:
