Archive: posts from August 2008

HowTo Update Rubygems by hand 28 Aug 08

The recent security issue with rails has led to several customers having to dabble with Rubygems possibly for the first time. A few have reported problems with the smaller Brightboxes running  older versions of gems. Essentially they run out of memory as Rubygems tries to download and update the entire Rubygems index.

If you have this problem you should upgrade to Rubygems 1.2.0 or greater, which handles the index in a different and less resource intensive way. You will have to install the Rubygems update by hand. I have added some instructions to the wiki about how to do this.

Rails security vulnerability 26 Aug 08

If you’ve been following the Rails security list you’ll know that there has been a serious flaw uncovered in the REXML library that allows an easy Denial of Service attack on the vast majority of Rails applications.

The Ruby details are here: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2008/08/23/dos-vulnerability-in-rexml/ and the instructions for applying the monkey patch fix for Rails is on the security google group: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security/browse_thread/thread/9fb60a1e22a88d30/330bcb96de877996#330bcb96de877996

Just to reiterate – this fault will affect the majority of Rails applications across all versions of Rails, whether you think you are processing XML or not, and we would urge all our customers (and all Rails users for that matter) to patch their applications until there is an upgrade to the Ruby libraries correcting the error.

Happy Birthday Debian! 17 Aug 08

The Debian project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993.  That makes it 15 years old yesterday.  Without Debian we wouldn’t have Ubuntu, the distro that powers our Brightboxes.  Happy birthday Debian!

See you at RailsConf Europe 2008 11 Aug 08

Baz, Neil, John and myself will be over at RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin from 2-4th September. We decided to go the whole hog this year and become a sponsor, which means we get a cell booth in the exhibition hall as well as our logo burned on attendees’ retinas at any opportunity :)

So, if you’re going, make sure to pop by our booth and say “hello”. The event also falls around our 1st “official” birthday (we have several – a bit like The Queen), so we’ll likely be buying drinks one evening. It’s not all work, work, work you know.

We’ll also have plenty more Brightbox t-shirts to hand out.

Baz joins the team 8 Aug 08

We’re really excited to welcome Baz (a.k.a Rahoul Baruah) to the Brightbox team.

Baz is a gifted software developer with 10 years experience and a long time friend of Brightbox. Baz built a lot of our existing billing system and he’ll now help drive the development of the next generation of our systems as well as getting involved in all aspects of the business.

Rumours that Baz only took the job because we have a rather large whiteboard are untrue, although he does admit to a rather unhealthy fascination :)