Update 8:59 PM
new souari seems to be up and running now. All static sites should be working, and while there may be some issues with certain php sites, so far our tests have been very positive. We'll remain working on this through the night, and update as soon as we can put a definite "done" stamp on everything, but for the time being, it looks like we're all back in business and we'd like to apologize to all of our clients who have been inconvenienced.

souari.forest.net has suffered a major hardware failure. We have been preparing a replacement for Souari for the past three days, and had planned to deploy it next week, but this development has forced our hand; the replacement box is in the process of being deployed as this is written.

Souari has been fully moved over to a new system and it's FTP service is back online. If you experience any issue that wasn't present before 8am PST this morning please open up a trouble ticket and please be as detailed as possible (error messages, type of code, etc).

It might be as simple as setting the proper permissions to a specific file or directory which can be accomplished by using your FTP client and setting permissions to that file or directory via its interface.

The process that is transferring the files is taken longer then expected. We will not able to turn on FTP service until the transfer completes. We expect that the transfer to be fully completed by 8am tomorrow morning, at which we will switch the machines over and the FTP service will work again.

At this point we are unable to stop the transfer at all since its past the 50% marker. FTP service will be back on by 8am PST tomorrow morning, that we can guarantee.

Just a reminder that your web hosting is not affected by this, your web site will continue to be hosted out to the internet.

Currently FTP service is disabled on Souari as we are in the process of moving over the files to another service. In light of yesterday's events we have decided to rebuild Souari and get rid of any problems it had. Web Service is NOT be affected by this, only the FTP service (the service that allows you to make changes to your website) is affected while this move takes place.

If it is an absolute emergency (such as your website is broken) we will stop the process. We apologize for this major inconvenience however we are doing this to ensure the privacy of your data.

Please monitor this website for any updates concerning this situation.

A change has been made to Souari that may affect some of your code. Recently we discovered that some of our customers had some of their directories set to "777" in other words: read (r), write (w) and execute (x) by everyone. This poses a major risk to security to the system as it was allowing a guest (unauthorized user) create files within your directory.

The way an Unix-based operating system works is that it has 3 sets of access.
First set is for the username that owns the directory and/or files
Second set is for the group name that owns the directory and/or files
Third set is for everyone else.

We have now made it so that this happens:
First set (the user) has full read (r), write (w) & execute (x). This doesn't change.
Second set (the group) has read (r) & execute (x). This changes from read (r), write (w), and execute (x).
Thrid set (the guest / other) has read (r) & execute (x). This changes from read (r), write (w), and execute (x).

The reason we are doing this is to protect everyone's data. This may be a small inconvienence to some (primarily those that have scripts that generate HTML pages on demand, for example some older blogging software), but its a major benefit to security.

This change has already been made on Souari. A script has been made to check these settings every 6 hours and if the directory is 777, it will change it back to 755. We may make this change to our other Unix-based machines in the near future.

-digital.forest technical support

Souari is now up and running on the new hardware. It's actually been up since about 9:00am, but we've been troubleshooting a problem that cropped up in three of the virtual hosts on the server. The practical upshot is that the latest version of Zend Optimizer (used to accelerate PHP code) is incompatible with software running on the new server. For the time being, we have disabled it; however, as the new hardware is significantly faster than the old, we expect your performance should be better even without the Optimizer. We'll continue to investigate the problem and reactivate the Optimizer when it becomes possible.

If you run into any problems with your site on souari, please contact us immediately and we'll resolve it.

As of 8:40am, we have disabled FTP connections on souari. As soon as the current connections end, we'll begin the final stage of the upgrade. We'll post here again when it is complete.

One of our main hosting servers, souari.forest.net, will be upgraded tomorrow morning to a much more powerful machine. We've been prepping the machine all day today; tomorrow morning, we will disable FTP access to the server to prevent files from changing, and synchronize the data. When this is complete, we will switch off the web server and perform a final synchronization, then switch on the web server on the new server. The downtime should be minimal, on the order of minutes.

We are performing this upgrade in the morning, rather than in the middle of the night, so that users of souari can immediately detect any problems that occur due to the upgrade. While we are striving to duplicate the setup as closely as possible, performance considerations and the new hardware itself demand that some software upgrades accompany the hardware upgrade. Should any problems arise with the site after the upgrade, please call us immediate at 425-483-0483, and we'll fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience! We think you'll appreciate the result.

souari.forest.net will be down briefly at approximately 5:00pm this evening for a RAM upgrade. We don't expect the downtime to last more than 10-15 minutes.

As announced yesterday, perl has been upgraded to version 5.8.5 on souari.forest.net. If you experience any problems with existing scripts, first try changing your perl line to:

#!/usr/bin/perl5

This may solve the problem, as it access the old perl binary. If not, please call us and we'll help you troubleshoot.

In general, we're happy to install any standard CPAN perl modules; indeed, this was the primary motivation for the upgrade, as many modules are now requiring or recommending a more recent version of perl than the one included with FreeBSD. If there's one you need, please feel free to open a ticket at helpdesk.forest.net and request it.

On Wednesday, Aug. 25, we will be upgrading perl on Souari from the very old 5.005_03 to the current 5.8.5. There will be no downtime during the upgrade, and it should be completed by noon. The vast majority of perl scripts should continue to work without problems, but should you run into any problems after the upgrade, please give us a call and we'll help you troubleshoot.

Souari experienced a Denial of Service attack this afternoon which rendered some websites inaccessible. The attack has been halted and all websites should be up and running.

The problem on souari has been identified as a runaway CGI. Obviously a user has uploaded a CGI script with some sort of typo, leading to a looping condition. This rapidly exhausts souari of apache processes, leading to the inability to serve pages. We will be working on isolating the user/CGI at the moment. We hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.

The issue was tracked to a client's CGI that was calling a non-existent 404 page. This put apache into a loop status. It has been resolved.

Souari will be intermittently available in the next 15-20 min, as we need to make some adjustments to the webserver. Thanks for your patience.

We are installing some security patches on Souari. This will briefly prevent users from making FTP connections; however, the web service will continue uninterrupted apart from a brief reboot.