Dear users of my plugins,

I know I haven’t updated my plugins for a while, even though some of them desperately need updates and although I have some very cool features on my TODO list. The reason is that I’m currently involved in a very big project, and this one really consumes pretty much all of my time and coding energy. That project will be finished by mid of November, and I promise that I will then start working on my plugins again and release a bunch of new versions. I hope you understand that, and I hope you’ll have some more patience. Thank you very much (in advance)!

By the way, my site seems to have a PR of 6 now, and I owe it all to the nice people who are writing nice comments about my plugins on their blogs. Thank you very much (again)!

Tonight, Oct. 18th at about 4:15 am, the Zirona I server will be shut down because of maintanance in the data center. The work is estimated to take about three hours. During this time, no services like e-mail and web will be available. After the maintenance works, the server is supposed to start up again automatically. It is however possible that there are complications, and it is also possible that they take the entire day or even more to be solved.

Even though downtime is always unpleasant, there’s no reason to be too sad: At least this server will have run more than 373 days untill this “forced” shutdown. This is an very impressive figure, and one shouldn’t take it for granted — it’s more that there are some important aspects that allowed the server to run such a long time.

• Although the webhost Hetzner did have two severe network problems this year, the servers kept running, which is an indication that Hetzner managed to solve the power issues in the data center (ironically, a power failure was the reason for the last showdown of this server), and the hardware seems — at least in the Zirona machine — not to be as bad as it’s sometimes said of Hetzner.
• Furthermore we can be happy, that the server was not compromised a single time during it’s now two years of usage — although there were a number of attacks, luckily every single of them could be averted. This is mostly due to the Linux system (to be precise: Hardened Gentoo in our case), but also due the other server applications like Apache, Postfix, Courier, MySQL, vsFTPd, and last but not least to often critisized web applications such as WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and osCommerce. You see, security has a lot to do with clean configuration and regular upgrading (though by far not only).

Therefore: Let’s hope for successful maintenance, a healthy re-awakening of the server tomorrow morning, and for the next uptime rekord!

P.S., 18.10., 11:04: We had a little hickup after the restart due to network rearrangements, but now everything runs fine again.