Emergency Scheduled Maintenance, PHP Upgrade 12/17/04

[allera]

Notice sent to all customers:


Dear Customer,

PHP 4.3.10 was released on December 15th which includes several serious security fixes. Because of these security fixes, we need to upgrade PHP as soon as possible. We will be doing so within the next two hours as an emergency scheduled maintenance.

All websites which use PHP will be affected. No other services will be affected during this maintenance window. We expect only a few seconds of downtime per web server (enough for an Apache restart). No complications are expected from this upgrade. We recommend reviewing the changelog for PHP 4.3.10 to ensure your scripts do not experience any problems after the upgrade. The changelog can be found here: http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.3.10 . Should there be any problems with the new version, we can roll back to the old one with little effort.

Zend Optimizer will also be upgraded at the same time due to a compatibility issue between older Zend Optimizer versions and PHP 4.3.10. Zend Optimizer will be upgraded silently before PHP is upgraded.

Should you have any questions and/or concerns regarding this scheduled maintenance, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@fluidhosting.com.

Thank you,
Administrators
Fluid Hosting, LLC

[allera]

The "Note:" in the first email referenced phpBB. It wasn't supposed to. :) It was corrected in the note to resellers.

Sorry about that.

PHP upgrades are almost done (unix web servers are done). Optimizers were done about 45 mins ago.

[allera]

All servers have been upgraded. No downtime should have been noticed. If anyone has any problems at all, please email our support center.

[AlexanderT]

My congrats to the FH team... the security problems were mentioned today on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/17/1641212) ... and FH has it already securely patched.

It's good to feel safe ;)

[ian]

I've opened a "trouble ticket" regarding this problem, but I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this error occuring since yesterday?

Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module: user (path: /tmp)
It's happening when people try to view my YaBBSE forum. I don't have any other PHP scripts that use sessions, so I can't check if it's something specific to the forum. But I doubt it is as there have been no recent changes to the forum software/config (and I don't recall seeing this error before yesterday)... so maybe it's related to this PHP upgrade?

Any advice is appreciated!

[FH-John]

Ian,

We've had other reports from people on different FreeBSD web servers. I've posted on another forum to see if any other hosts are seeing this problem. Little slow today since it's a holiday, but i'll try to do what I can.

[inTELLiGrunt]

use of /tmp + shared hosting = not good

[FH-John]

Yeah, I wish for an alternative. I'd like to see some DB based session storage used.

[ian]

We've had other reports from people on different FreeBSD web servers. I've posted on another forum to see if any other hosts are seeing this problem. Little slow today since it's a holiday, but i'll try to do what I can.
Ok, thanks. Good to know I'm not the only one who's seen it :)

[NIKKI712]

I've opened a "trouble ticket" regarding this problem, but I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this error occuring since yesterday?

I'm having problems too. I was really busy over the holidays, and had problems with my internet access, so I wasn't even aware of the problem til today. I'm not getting any error messages, but my pages won't load on my forum. They're all just a big white blank most of the time. It's really irritating, especially since I have already dealt with major high speed int. problems all day today, then log on to find my forum having problems. UGH!

While this is a pain for me, I have to say that Fluidhosting has been REALLY good to me, and I have all the confidance in the world in them getting this straightened out. They're support is unsurpassed, thank God!

[FH-John]

Nikki712,

Drop us an e-mail. We've got a solution that has been working for people. It's not as elegant of a method we'd like, but unfortunately it'll need to do in the interim.

[NIKKI712]

Hi John,

Your post was music to my ears/eyes! :)

I sent an email earlier, but I'll send another one. My internet problems probably have something to do with why you didn't get it when I first sent it. I hope you get this one! (Fingers crossed)

Thanks again!