07Jan

PHP 5.3.5 Upgrade


This evening all Mr.Host web servers have been upgraded to PHP 5.3.5.

This release resolves a critical issue, reported as PHP bug #53632, where conversions from string to double might cause the PHP interpreter to hang on systems using x87 FPU registers.

For more details, see the release notes:

http://www.php.net/releases/5_3_5.php

12Sep

Mr.DNS Network Tools v1.9


This Mr.DNS release includes support for the AAAA (IPv6) record, the LOC record (for storing geo-location information in DNS)

and all the DNSSEC resource records (DNSKEY, RRSIG, NSEC, DS, NSEC3 and NSEC3PARAM).

This release is also the first release to us our new Net_DNS2 PEAR module. This module is significantly faster than the Net_DNS module, using new PHP5 constructs, exceptions, and includes many more RR’s.

Net_DNS2 is available for download from the Google Code page, and soon from the PEAR site and command line PEAR installer.

13Aug

Partial Network Outage


This morning between the hours of 7:35 AM and 9:45 AM, Mr.Host experienced a partial network outage.

One of the four network interfaces on the main NAS (Network Attached Storage) device failed, causing some servers to lose access to the web and e-mail disk storage.

This would have affected access to your website and e-mail. Any e-mail received during this period would have been queued on the Mr.Host E-mail Cluster, and delivered once the issue was resolved- no e-mail was lost during this outage.

The network interface was replaced with a spare, and service was completely restored at 9:45 AM.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

If you have any questions or concerns about this outage, please let us know.

26Jul

PHP 5.3.3 Upgrade


This evening all Mr.Host web servers have been upgraded to PHP 5.3.3

Backwards incompatible change:

  • Methods with the same name as the last element of a namespaced class name will no longer be treated as constructor. This change doesn’t affect non-namespaced classes.
<?php

namespace Foo;

class Bar {
    public function Bar() {

        // treated as constructor in PHP 5.3.0-5.3.2
        // treated as regular method in PHP 5.3.3
    }
}

?>

There is no impact on migration from 5.2.x because namespaces were only introduced in PHP 5.3.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.3:

  • Rewrote var_export() to use smart_str rather than output buffering, prevents data disclosure if a fatal error occurs (CVE-2010-2531).
  • Fixed a possible resource destruction issues in shm_put_var().
  • Fixed a possible information leak because of interruption of XOR operator.
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption because of unexpected call-time pass by refernce and following memory clobbering through callbacks.
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption in ArrayObject::uasort().
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption in parse_str().
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption in pack().
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption in substr_replace().
  • Fixed a possible memory corruption in addcslashes().
  • Fixed a possible stack exhaustion inside fnmatch().
  • Fixed a possible dechunking filter buffer overflow.
  • Fixed a possible arbitrary memory access inside sqlite extension.
  • Fixed string format validation inside phar extension.
  • Fixed handling of session variable serialization on certain prefix characters.
  • Fixed a NULL pointer dereference when processing invalid XML-RPC requests (Fixes CVE-2010-0397, bug #51288).
  • Fixed SplObjectStorage unserialization problems (CVE-2010-2225).
  • Fixed possible buffer overflows in mysqlnd_list_fields, mysqlnd_change_user.
  • Fixed possible buffer overflows when handling error packets in mysqlnd.

Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.3 include:

  • Upgraded bundled sqlite to version 3.6.23.1.
  • Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 8.02.
  • Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI.
  • Added stream filter support to mcrypt extension.
  • Added full_special_chars filter to ext/filter.
  • Fixed a possible crash because of recursive GC invocation.
  • Fixed bug #52238 (Crash when an Exception occured in iterator_to_array).
  • Fixed bug #52041 (Memory leak when writing on uninitialized variable returned from function).
  • Fixed bug #52060 (Memory leak when passing a closure to method_exists()).
  • Fixed bug #52001 (Memory allocation problems after using variable variables).
  • Fixed bug #51723 (Content-length header is limited to 32bit integer with Apache2 on Windows).
  • Fixed bug #48930 (__COMPILER_HALT_OFFSET__ incorrect in PHP >= 5.3).

For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available on http://php.net/migration53, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.3, see the ChangeLog.

16Jul

Mr.DNS Network Tools v1.6


I’ve released a new version of the Mr.DNS Network Tools website.

New features include:

SPF Parsing and Validation:

DNS SRV Records:

HTTP Header Parsing for any HTTP/HTTPS URL:

and many other small changes and fixes.