BASH shell vulnerability fixed
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- Created on Thursday, 25 September 2014 13:28 25 September 2014
A few hours ago, it has been discovered a new global web server vulnerability in the Bash shell. Its scale is as serious as the famous ‘Heartbleed’ one found recently on OpenSSL. Bash is one of the most widely used utilities in any UNIX-based system, making this vulnerability especially critical.
The vulnerability has been named 'Shellshock' and it allows an attacker to create system variables which may contain malicious code which would be executed whenever Bash is invoked.
The vulnerability has been detected on most web server platforms – from most Linux & UNIX distributions to Apple’s Mac OS X, and threatens a large number of web applications, including CMSs like WordPress and Joomla.
Kind Regards,
Support team
PHP NG now enabled on our servers for development purposes
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- Created on Tuesday, 26 August 2014 16:22 26 August 2014
On the heels of the recent PHP updates to our system – the introduction of PHP sockets and the upgrade to v 5.6.0, we have now activated PHP NG on our servers.
PHP NG was first introduced in May, 2014 as a major effort to refactor the PHP codebase in order to reduce memory consumption and to increase overall performance.
Although still in alpha development, PHP NG is starting to show amazing performance improvements over the current stable PHP version – PHP 5.6, while maintaining 100% compatibility.
The tests of developers have shown that PHP 5.7 NG is performing anywhere between 20% and 110% faster than PHP 5.6 in real-world applications such as WordPress, Drupal or SugarCRM. Memory consumption has been reduced significantly too.
Also, PHP NG’s refactored codebase is an excellent basis for future optimizations, and its performance level keeps improving.
PHP 5.7 NG is used only for development purposes and will most probably not be suitable for production use this year. However, it has all the potential to turn into a phenomenon for servers around the world, with more stable betas and even release candidates expected in early 2015.
You can enable PHP NG from the PHP Configuration section of the Web Hosting Control Panel.
Kind Regards,
Support team
Backups for cloud & semi-dedicated hosting customers will be stored even longer
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- Created on Friday, 22 August 2014 08:34 22 August 2014
As of this week, backups will be kept for one full month before they are deleted from our servers.
A few months ago, we made a few significant improvements to the backup service for the cloud hosting and semi-dedicated server accounts. First, we increased the daily number of backups to 4, thanks to the implementation of the ZFS file system, and second – we brought data backups right to your fingertips with the option to browse your backup archives from your Control Panel.
We have made another important improvement by extending the period for which we keep your backups on our system.
As of this week, backups will be kept for one full month before they are deleted from our servers. This means that, at any given moment, any customer can choose a preferred restore point from the last 30 days and restore their website back to the way it was.
Here is how our entire backup system works after the new time extension has been introduced:
- Most recent backups: we will keep 4 different daily backups for up to 3 days back in time
- Recent backups: between 3 days and 10 days back in time, we will keep 1 daily backup of your data
- Extended backups: between 10 days and 30 days back in time, we will keep 2 backups each week. These will be the backups from Monday and Thursday.
For your convenience, these backups will not count against your storage quota, so you will not have to worry about your account’s resource usage.
And most importantly – these extended backups will be available to you for free, so you will not need to upgrade in order to get them.
Just like before, you will be able to restore a full backup or just a folder with just one click on the Web Hosting Control Panel.
Kind Regards,
Support team
PHP socket extension enabled on all our hosting servers
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- Created on Wednesday, 06 August 2014 16:40 06 August 2014
Following on customers requests, we have installed the PHP socket extension on all our web hosting servers to provide PHP socket programmers with a low-level interface for network communication purposes.
PHP sockets are fundamental endpoints that allow clients and servers to communicate in a networked environment. They create an end-to-end communication channel through which a client can send requests to a server and receive a response from it in return.
For instance, when you type www.google.com in your web browser, it opens a socket (usually on port 80) and connects to the web server to deliver the page to you. The same holds true for any chat client like gTalk or Skype, for example.
Up until now, we have supported functions like fsockopen() for network communication purposes. With the installation of the PHP socket extension, developers will be able to use an array of more complicated functions that will offer them a greater flexibility in establishing a socket-based client-server communication over TCP/IP and in building simple, PHP-based, client-server network applications.
Here is a list of the main low-level-interface functions for creating and manipulating socket communications that are now supported on our servers:
socket_accept— accepts a connection on a socketsocket_bind— binds a name to a socketsocket_clear_error— clears an error on the socketsocket_close— closes a socket resourcesocket_cmsg_space— calculates the size of the message buffersocket_connect— starts a connection on a socketsocket_create_listen— opens a socket on a portsocket_create_pair— creates a pair of indistinguishable sockets and stores them in an arraysocket_create— creates a socketsocket_get_option— gets socket options for the socketsocket_getpeername— queries the remote side of the given socket;socket_getsockname— queries the local side of the given socket;socket_import_stream— imports a streamsocket_last_error— returns the last error on a socketsocket_listen— listens for a connection on a socketsocket_read— reads the maximum length of bytes from a socketsocket_recv— receives data from a connected socketsocket_recvfrom— receives data from a socketsocket_recvmsg— reads a messagesocket_select— runs the select() system call on the given arrays of sockets with a specified timeoutsocket_send— sends data to a connected socketsocket_sendmsg— send a messagesocket_sendto— sends a message to a socketsocket_set_block— sets blocking mode on a socket resourcesocket_set_nonblock— sets a file descriptor to non-blocking modesocket_set_option— sets socket options for the socketsocket_shutdown— shuts down a socket for receiving, sending, or bothsocket_strerror— returns a string, which describes a socket errorsocket_write— writes to a socket
Those of you who are unfamiliar with socket programming can find a lot of useful information on the Unix Socket FAQ page. With slight modifications, this information is fully applicable to socket programming in PHP.
Kind Regards,
Support team
