Hosting

MySQL upgrade and planned outage announcement

Hosting, MySQL

mysql_logo

MySQL v5.1 Upgrade

Our upstream provider is upgrading MySQL on your server from version 5.0 to version 5.1 as part of their commitment to web hosting security and performance.

This is an important change to ensure continued compatibility with current and future software and to ensure the stability and security of services for all customers.

For most users this change will have minimal impact on websites hosted with us and the latest releases of popular software such as Joomla and WordPress are already compatible with this upgrade.

This is a good time for you to ensure your software installations are current because you could experience problems if it has been designed around earlier versions of MySQL. We also ask that you check to make sure that any custom code is compatible with the newer version of MySQL.

For more detailed information about this upgrade please visit the official MySQL page Upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1

The upgrade is scheduled to start between the 30th and 31st of July 2013. The upgrades will begin after 21:00hrs GMT and shouldn’t take any longer than 60 minutes.

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08/02/2012 Emergency PHP Updates on server

Hosting, PHP

EMERGENCY PHP UPDATES

We will be applying a PHP update to the servers later this evening.

This will take the primary PHP install from v5.3.9 to v5.3.10 and will resolve a vulnerability that has been patched in the 5.3.10 release.

The vulnerability present in 5.3.9 allows for the possibility of remote code execution depending on how large numbers and arrays are used.

As this is a security issue we will be performing emergency maintenance between midnight and 3am (GMT).

There should be no interruption to service however, as the work is being done on components critical to PHP based sites, this period should be considered at risk.

The work will cause slightly higher than normal load on the servers and may involve a restart of the web server.

In the worst cast scenario (such as a failed compile) the installer will restore a backup of the current working configuration.

No module or configuration changes will be made to the PHP stack and scripts should notice no difference.

You can view the change log on the php.net site: http://php.net/ChangeLog-5.php

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Force trailing slash with .htaccess

2 Comments / Development, Hosting

There are a few reasons to force a trailing slash at the end of URLs including SEO

A quick snippet for your .htaccess is below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

And while I’m here a quick snippet to prevent hotlinking of images. This will redirect all requests to a specified image, simply replace yoursite.com with your own URL, and nohotlinking.jpg with your own image and path.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlinking.jpg [L]

And finally a snippet to put in your image assets folder (you have images stored separately right?) to prevent malicious code execution and prevent directory listing of all your assets.
Options All -Indexes
AddHandler cgi-script .php .php4 .php5 .pl .jsp .asp .sh .cgi
Options -ExecCGI

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