mysql has been upgraded from 5.0.45-7 to 5.0.77-3
dbhost is the host for www.smith.edu based databases.
(The recent patches to sophia will be applied to www.smith.edu soon)
apache has been patched from 2.2.3-22 to 2.2.3-31
mysql has been patched from 5.0.45-7 to 5.0.77
On www.smith.edu and sophia.smith.edu httpd and mod_ssl have been patched this morning.
httpd from 2.2.3-22.el5_3.1 to 2.2.3-22.el5_3.2
mod_ssl is also patched up to this version.
The new web server policy has been posted:
http://www.smith.edu/its/about_its/webserver_policy.html
While this does not explicitly refer to sophia, the same principles apply.
This morning I’ve patched httpd (apache) on both sophia and websvr. The patch was from version 2.2.3-22.el5 to 2.2.3-22.el5_3.1. This is a very minor patch. No major changes in behavior are expected.
One of the changes to default php behavior for security reasons is to no longer display error messages to the web browser. This could give insight into how code works to someone trying to exploit it. However, this takes away helpful information for people writing code and trying to figure out what is wrong with it. To make up for this I hacked together a quick unsophisticated tool for people to look for errors.
This tool takes the IP of the machine you are web browsing with and does a search on the system error logs for your IP. It looks both in the SSL (for https:// traffic) and normal error logs (http://) and displays those with separate headers. I color coded it for fun, and at some point I might try to spiff it up better. But for now, this is a quick and dirty way to see what might be going on with your code.
Authentication is required. Sorry, no off-campus access for security reasons.
Sophia’s error checker: https://sophia.smith.edu/errorlog/
websvr’s error checker: https://www.smith.edu/its/util/web-errors/
Yeah, don’t ask me why I decided to have very different urls.
I’ll be using this blog to make notes and comments on changes, events, updates, patches or whatnot for the two multi-user web servers I run: www.smith.edu and sophia.smith.edu. (servers like alumnae.smith.edu and moodle.smith.edu that are maintained by one or several people is handled directly with those staff people).
The idea is that for minor changes and events that don’t need to be broadcasted to the community can still be found here for those who want the extra details and transparency. I’ll probably also include more detail on big events than what you might see on the status page (www.smith.edu/status) or in edigest announcements of major events. We shall see, this is an attempt by us to create a more transparent non-filtered look into what is going on.
A quick note on what the current server situations are. www.smith.edu (sometimes known as websvr, creatively), was upgraded from Red Hat AS 3 (linux) to Red Hat 5 (they took out the “AS” designation) on March 18th 2009. The upgrade also included a new physical server with more memory and disk space. In addition the MySQL database that lived on websvr was moved to a back-end database server for several reasons. First of all to ease migration and upgrades for the websvr. Second to have a dedicated high performance system for database back-end with the understanding that more and more web pages may become database driven. Third was to increase security.
Sophia (sophia.smith.edu) was upgraded from Red Hat AS 4 to Red Hat 5 on May 26th 2009. No hardware change.
Red Hat 5 introduces php 5, apache 2.2 and MySQL 5. (In contrast, RH AS 4 was php 4, apache 2.0, MySQL 4).
Systems and Network Services TechNotes