Announcements

Core Network Upgrade (Completed)

As part of on-going network expansion plans, the core network at the facility where your service is hosted is being upgraded with new, more powerful hardware. This hardware is already in place and the network team have been extensively testing configurations over the past few weeks alongside the existing infrastructure.

This new hardware will increase capacity on the network and implement several additional layers to both prevent and more easily mitigate any incoming attacks on the network.

This major upgrade to the core network has been scheduled to take place during the following maintenance window:

START: Monday 18th August, 2014 @ 22:00 BST END : Tuesday 19th August, 2014 @ 02:00 BST

During this time, there may be periods where network connectivity is impacted. This cannot be avoided unfortunately, however we have scheduled the above maintenance out of business hours to cause as little impact to service as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this essential work.

Posted: 13 August 2014
By: Paul Dancey

PHP Upgrade (Completed)

We will be commencing a PHP upgrades across all our servers on 21st August 2014 to move to version 5.4.

We had originally planned to offer PHP 5.3 as a secondary stack after the upgrade to allow clients time to ensure their sites are PHP 5.4 compatible. However, a number of security vulnerabilities with PHP versions lower than 5.5.2 have recently been discovered, and we are therefore modifying our previous upgrade plan.

As a result, this upgrade will now include PHP 5.5 as an additional secondary stack. The primary stack will remain as 5.4 as previously planned.

This means that by default, your sites will use version 5.4. However you will also be able to choose between using 5.3 or 5.5 on a site-by-site basis.

We are recommending that everyone try their sites for compatibility with 5.5 as soon as possible, as some security vulnerabilities have come to light that are not being patched in 5.4 or 5.3. These include a session hijack vulnerability (CVE-2011-4718) and a phpinfo() information leak bug). 5.5+ is currently the only version which patches these security issues.

Please see the PHP Net website for further information about migrating to PHP 5.5

We expect PHP version 5.3 to be end-of-life by late 2014. We will make an additional announcement when this will be removed from the servers, but it's likely to be by the end of the year. Following this upgrade we are asking clients to test their scripts/sites with newer PHP versions to ensure compatibility, as we may have to bring the EOL of 5.3 forward if any major security issues come to light.

Posted: 16 July 2014
By: Paul Dancey

Network Issues (Resolved)

We are aware of some customer impacting network problems at the moment. We are currently investigating these problems and will keep clients updated.

Update
The attack has been mitigated for some time and we have been monitoring the flow of traffic over the past hour to identify how to permanently mitigate the attack. For now, we do not anticipate the attack returning.

Posted: 18 June 2014
By: Paul Dancey

Rebooting Server - Chad (Completed)

This server is going down for a reboot and will be back up shortly. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Posted: 16 June 2014
By: Paul Dancey

Emergency Maintenance - Buckley & Chad (Completed)

We have been advised by our hardware manufacturers that emergency maintenance will need to be performed on Buckley and Chad.

We expect the maintenance to last no longer than 30 minutes, and during this time the machines will be safely powered down, tweaks made to the physical machines by data centre staff and powered back on. We do not anticipate any delays in booting back up, aside from file system checks.

The scheduled maintenance period can be found below: START: Tuesday 17th June, 2014 - 23:00 END : Tuesday 17th June, 2014 - 23:59 ETA: : 30 minutes

To confirm, during this period website access will be unavailable and any emails sent to an address hosted on these servers will be queued on our email cluster.

Posted: 14 June 2014
By: Paul Dancey

Cymnet Announcements last updated: 29 May 2018 at 12:36:18 AM