RE: Freedom Upgrade Question

Hi Jesse, Thanks for your reply. I don't mind a harsh answer and I certainly wouldn't complain about an honest answer. As I said, I do understand that Interland cannot make available every upgrade to every software distribution known to Man, five minutes after it's released to the public. (Incidentally. PHP 4.2.3 was released today -- 4.2.2 addressed a different security vulnerability [ http://www.php.net/release_4_2_2.php ]). However, I find the attitude that it's "easier" to do something else (just write some instructions) despite the fact that "most" (as you said) of your customers would apparently like more timely upgrades quite appalling. If you are not driven by what "most" of your customers want, what does drive Interland? I don't envy anyone who has to deal with upgrading 4000 servers, but that *is* your business. If Interland is finding their customer load too much, perhaps they should consider downsizing or moving into a different business that presents no challenges. In fact, I'm at the point where I am going to consider helping you in that regard (downsizing) -- other companies with which I host servers seem to have no trouble providing recent versions of software like PHP. Thanks for your time. I am quite unhappy about this situation, and if you feel it would be helpful you are more than welcome to share this thread with anybody else at Interland who might be concerned about customer feedback. Craig Hartnett At 02:09:06 15:52 -0400 Jesse Smith wrote:

Craig, I don't know of any plans to do it any time soon. The reason we don't to it as often as most would like, is simply that we provide instructions for those wanting to upgrade. It is simply easier to give the customers access to the instructions, and have them do the upgrades if and when they see fit to do so rather then upgrading 4000 servers. I know that's somewhat of a harsh answer, but it's the honest one. Jesse Smith V.A.R. Team Lead Toll Free 1-866-495-7563 MSN Messenger ID inld2001 Jsmith@interland.com http://www.interland.com/ ASK ME ABOUT THE $129 DEDICATED SERVER! -----Original Message----- From: NinerNet Communications [mailto:webmaster@niner.ca] Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 3:43 PM

To:     Jesse Smith
Subject:        RE: Freedom Upgrade Question

Hi Jesse, Thanks for the spreadsheet. I notice that PHP 4.0.6 is indeed listed and this is good. However, this still doesn't address my question about Interland's commitment to making available "reasonably recent" versions of PHP. Version 4.0.6 is over a year old and is susceptible to a widely-publicised, six-month-old "critical" security risk detailed at http://security.e-matters.de/advisories/012002.html and defined there as "very easy to exploit" (for version 4.0.6). Version 4.2.0, which was released five months ago, addresses this problem. Is Interland planning to make 4.2.x available in the near future? If so, is this a high priority or something that will be addressed "whenever"? If the former, do you have a projected date? Again, if you have no concrete plans, I'd be interested in the reason why. Thanks. Have a good weekend. Craig Hartnett At 02:09:06 11:27 -0400 Jesse Smith wrote: <<freedom upgraded apps list0612.xls>> Jesse Smith V.A.R. Team Lead Toll Free 1-866-495-7563 MSN Messenger ID inld2001 Jsmith@interland.com http://www.interland.com/ ASK ME ABOUT THE $129 DEDICATED SERVER! -----Original Message----- From: NinerNet Communications [mailto:webmaster@niner.ca] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 3:42 PM

To:     Jesse Smith
Subject:        Freedom Upgrade Question
Importance:     High

Hi Jesse, Just one quick question -- I want to be sure that I fully and correctly understand Interland's position on software upgrades. Some background follows and the question is at the end. On pages 72 and 73 of the FAQs for the Freedom upgrade at http://upgrade.freedom.registeredsite.com/Freedom_FAQ.pdf are listed the various software packages that will be upgraded or will be available to be upgraded. PHP is not listed. On page 66 the following sentence appears: "Due to a number of factors, such as reliability concerns and development resource limitations, your server will not always have the newest version of PHP." I can understand and support this statement and realise that Interland must put various versions of software through quality-assurance testing. Therefore, a new version of PHP (or anything else) is not going to be available five minutes after it's released. However, the version of PHP running on my server is 4.0.1pl2, which was released on June 28th, 2000 -- over two years ago! Is this how Interland defines a "market leader"? I was also told that this Freedom upgrade would include an upgrade to at least 4.0.6, released "only" a little over year ago (June 23rd, 2001). However, even that version doesn't take into consideration serious security flaws that have been published since then, and I'd still have to use various workarounds to get modern scripts to run properly. Do your clients ordering new Freedom servers today get PHP 4.0.1pl2? I do realise that on page 66 of the FAQs are also instructions for upgrading PHP myself. However, one of the reasons I host with Interland using your Freedom product is that I expect you to take care of core functionality like PHP, Apache, the operating system, etc. You also advertise that one of the great advantages of Freedom is the shared use of disk space (3FS [Fast Flexible File Sharing], page 5) for things like PHP -- if I have to upgrade it myself, then I'm going to use up a bunch of disk space I wasn't using before. I also, as is pointed out in the FAQs and in other documentation, cross a support boundary. Taking all of this into account I might as well be running a dedicated server out of my basement, which defeats the purpose of outsourcing my need for managed hosting to Interland (as touted by Interland at http://www.interland.com/getting_started/why/ and http://www.interland.com/getting_started/why/why_outsource.pdf ). So, my question is, do I correctly understand that Interland is abandoning provision and support of reasonably recent versions of PHP? If so, please let me know what the reason is. Thanks in advance for your assistance. NinerNet Communications Craig Hartnett