There are little automated programs called web crawlers or robots that are sent out to crawl web pages for inclusion into the databases that make up search engines. Some of these bots are beneficial such as Googlebot, the robot that scours the Internet on behalf of the search engines of all search engines, Google.

Most of these bots are harmless, hardly making any waves during their routine visits. But then there are bots such as TWICELER!!! This bot causes havoc with pages that are dynamically generated by php scripts such as calendars and forums. It has been known to dramatically increase the bandwidth that a web site uses. It can even cause server resources to be used up to the point that it adversely effects the server and all the accounts on it.

continue reading "Beware of this Robot!"

Okay you webmail power users, you will now be noticing a new player on the field when logging into your webmail account. RoundCube is now officially a part of EMWD’s service offering.

RoundCube is a browser-based IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It comes with an address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking. We encourage you to visit http://roundcube.net for more information. For those of you who enjoyed using NeoMail, we think you will find RoundCube to be a much better solution and replacement.

Let us know what you think and as always, thank you for using EMWD as your web hosting (and webmail) provider!

Our data center, LiquidWeb, is experiencing a Denial Service Attack that has wiped out one of their connections. This is having an adverse effect on host2.emwd.com. The problem is being addressed and we expect service to be restore momentarily. We apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE at 13:02

Network connectivity is coming back howbeit slowly. Some users may still experience delays in response time either from host2.emwd.com or host.emwd.com.

Host.emwd.com is not responding due to a load spike. We are currently rebooting the server. That will bring the server back online in about 10 minutes. We will then investigate what caused the load spike and deal with it accordingly.

The server is back online and all services are responding. Thank you for your patience.

We have just finished working on one of our latest development projects:

http://www.brucekolb.com

Mr. Kolb is a world renown singing/acting teacher who was looking for a sophisticated looking web site that would promote his highly regarded skills to the world at large. EMWD was hired to accomplish this task and from the following comments, I believe we have achieved Mr. Kolb’s requirements:

“Everything looks great!! You are the best!!
All best, BK”

“Hi Brian, just got back into town. The discography page looks fantastic. Everything looks just great. Some friends and colleagues of mine suggested that I eliminate two of my head shots, and I agree. On the third pane of the gallery, if you could just delete the first two head shots of me on the left, leaving the one on the far right with the glasses, coat and blue shirt, that would be great.

Everyone loves the site and asks who did it. So I hope you are ok with my recommending students and colleagues, or are you overworked there?
All best, Bruce”

Overall, Mr. Kolb was a joy to work with and we are very pleased he got what he wanted. Now unto the next project!

The mysql server is currently down on host3.emwd.com. We are working on the problem and should have mysql up and running shortly. I will update this post when the issue has been resolved.

Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE:

The mysql problem has been resolved and your databases should be responding now. Thank you for your patience.

A few weeks back, we made an announcement regarding the EOL (end of line) of php4 and our decision to abandon it because of this. Since then we have reconsider that decision and discarded it. Instead we have decided to run both php4 and php5 on our servers as long as cPanel supports it, which will be until some major security flaw is discovered, even if it goes past its EOL.

We did decide to make php5 the default  handler for .php files. What this means is, if you are running a script that is not compatible with php5 and it is generating some funky error messages via your browser, then you have two options:

1. Rename the file to end with the .php4 file extension

or . . .

2. Login to your hosting control panel, click on the “PHP configuration” icon within the Software/Services section of your hosting control panel, and set php4 as the default handler for your account. Once you do this, all of your .php files will now be running under php4 and not php5.

Obviously, option 2 is the better one.

As previously promised, we have begun updating our servers to Apache 2.2/php 5.2.5/php 4.4.8.

Thank you for using EMWD and as always, we appreciate everyone of our clients!

A hard drive on host.emwd.com is failing and we will need to replace it this morning. We have the work scheduled to start at 10am. The server will be down during this process and we will do our best to get it back up and running asap.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Such events are beyond control and all we can do is try to fix the problem in an efficient and timely manner.

Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE 1:

Since we do weekly backups, we have opted to clone the drive first to a new one so to retain the most current snapshot of the accounts’ data on that drive. The cloning process will take anywhere between 2-4 hours. During this time, accounts on this drive will be down. This includes e-mail.

Update 2:

The cloning process is almost complete (12:14 pm EST). It will be about another 30 minutes and then we will be taking the server down to install the new cloned drive.

Update 3:

The cloning process is complete and the new hard drive has been installed. Server has been restarted and all sites and e-mail should be functional. Please let us know at http://www.emwd.com/support/ if you have any issues. Thank you for your patience.

We are currently having delivery problems with our mailman server on host.emwd.com. We are looking into and should have the mailman server back up and running within the hour.

 At this point the mailman server is not able to do a hostname lookup which sounds like a DNS issue on our end, but our DNS is in order according to our initial investigations. This hostname lookup failure is preventing mailman from delivering mail to list members.

 UPDATE:

We have corrected the issue and mailman is once again delivering to every list. No posts were lost during this outage. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused our mailman clients on host.emwd.com.

Starting sometime today, you will be able to install Joomla 1.5 from the Fantastico section of your hosting control panel. The Joomla 1.0x branch will still be available under the name ‘Joomla’ in Fantastico.

continue reading "Joomla 1.5 is here."