The blog post at Raincity Studios has the full details: Bryght will cease hosting on April 30th, 2009 and we will completely shut down by May 29th, 2009. Email transition@bryght.com if you have not received communication from us about this.

Over the Easter weekend, we will monitor email remotely on Friday and Monday (and the Saturday and Sunday) but may not be available except for emergency support. We are back in the office on Tuesday, April 14th.

With the release of Drupal 5.16, we've updated our public subversion repository to include this update plus the Watchdog hook patch. The new tag is 2009-03-04s. The latest version includes security fixes for Windows servers (which do not apply to hosting on our VPS hosting service, since we run on Linux servers) and a couple of bug fixes, including an increase in the length of the text box for tagging to 1024 characters. (I got the ball rolling with my initial patch to increase it to 255 characters.) See the release notes on Drupal.org for more information. Updating to the latest tag should include the following:

• backup your database, although there are no database updates between 5.15 and 5.16, it's still a good opportunity
• update your tagged release on your server

As part of ongoing maintenance and yet another stage in our move of the Bryght Light hosted service to Aegir, we'll be changing some internal IP adresses for the Bryght Light hosted service server cluster at approximately 10p.m. Pacific Tuesday February 16, 2009. No action is required from customers as all the IP addresses are used on Bryght Light's back-end. Also, Bryght Virtual Private Servers (VPSes) will not be affected. Let us know if you have any issues by contacting us.

Tonight, as we continue moving the Bright Light hosted service to the Aegir provisioning system, we'll be deleting approximately 300 unused free Bryght Light Sites with Ads. They have no content other than the default content which was originally created with the site. Paid and free-trial sites are not affected.

Great News! We are upgrading Bryght Light to use the third generation version of our hosting system, the open source Aegir system architected by Adrian. As a result, we have disabled Bryght Light signups and will re-enable them after the transition is complete. As always if you have any questions, please contact us and of course you can still sign up for a Bryght VPS; Bryght VPS is not affected by this upgrade to Bryght Light!

As of 2 AM early this morning, all hosted service Bryght Light customers have Drupal 5.15 running as the basis for their site, also incorporating all the changes released in our most recent tag.

Yesterday most (likely all) of our customers experienced an outage on their websites and virtual private servers. The reason for this was that our primary nameserver, ns1.bryght.com, was compromised and subsequently used to scan for vulnerable machines. The scanning overwhelmed our firewall with a very high number of small packets. This caused the load on our firewall to increase to the point where it was very slow to respond to legitimate traffic. The DNS server has since been rebuilt and services have returned to normal.

No other system was compromised and no private customer data was released.

We recommend that If you have not already configured your domain to take advantage of our third DNS server (ns3.bryght.com) that you do so now. ns3.bryght.com is located in a completely different data centre and as such provides additional redundancy. We are working to provide even more redundancy than that, and we thank everybody for their patience yesterday.

(The outage was not related to yesterday's increased traffic on the Internet due to the inauguration ceremonies in the United States. Though some people did privately make the connection, it was completely coincidental.)

Last week the Drupal community released Drupal 5.15 which incorporates a security fix and some bug reports. Site administrators are encouraged to look at the release notes for the new version and the security advisory that prompted this release. This tag is 2009-01-19s and we recommend that you follow our instructions to get the latest release. This tag, because it upgrades the FeedBurner module (see below), requires that you run update.php for database updates. Before you do so, we recommend you backup your databases.

This release adds new features to the FeedBurner module, most importantly the ability to use their MyBrand service in conjunction with your site. MyBrand gives you the option to point your own domain or subdomain to your FeedBurner feeds so that you have more control over the RSS feed URLs. For example, if you host your site at example.com, instead of feeds.feedburner.com/ExampleSite, your feed URLs can be feeds.example.com/ExampleSite. See the overview at FeedBurner for more information. (Astute observers will note that this is a developmental release of the FeedBurner module, but both at the old official release page and at the newer release page on Drupal.org, the developer of the module recommends this as the most stable and up-to-date version.)

Based on a bug report from a Bryght customer over at GetSatisfaction, we've incorporated a patch to the OpenID module that will allow Blogger OpenID URLs (among others) to login to Bryght-powered websites. We've also included the patch file for VPS system administrators if they wish to update or modify the OpenID module themselves and incorporate it later.

Late last week the Drupal community released, in quick succession, Drupal 5.13 and Drupal 5.14. The first release was a critical security release aimed at preventing cross-site scripting (see the advisory for more information), and the second release was to fix a regression (a bug, not a security issue) introduced by that security fix. We're taking the opportunity to update a few modules as well: CCK is updated to 1.10, Google Analytics is updated to 1.7, Image Assist is updated to 1.7, and the Mollom spam-fighting module is updated to 1.6. We've also contributed the update we made to the Watchdog hook backport patch to the community.

The tag for today's release is 2008-12-16s. We recommend that you backup your databases before upgrading, then proceed to using our instructions on how to upgrade the VPS installations of Drupal to the latest tag.

Drupal has released version 5.12, which since 5.11 only contains a security fix. Since 5.11 and 5.12 we also fixed a bug where install profiles would "fail" with a white screen of death, which is incorporated into today's tagged release, 2008-10-22s.

There are no database changes between 5.11 and 5.12, but we still recommend that you make backups of your database(s) and follow our instructions on how to upgrade the VPS installations of Drupal to the latest tag.