Archive: posts from September 2011

It’s a new brand day! 27 Sep 11

It’s been almost 4 years since we started Brightbox, and our little hand drawn box logo has worked hard and served us well over this time – brightly adorning the chest of many a well-dressed ruby developer!

However, we felt that as we launch Brightbox Cloud and continue to grow, it was time for a review of our brand identity.

We collaborated with the awesome guys at Fudge Studios and PJD to develop the new identity which conveys more clearly what we consider are the distinguishing characteristics of Brightbox as a company: “clarity”, “openness” and “transparency”. Also, we like the colours ;)

Public launch of Brightbox Cloud

I’m happy to announce that the official launch of Brightbox Cloud will be on 3rd October 2011 (less than a week to go!), and the new website is now live.

Also, as you can see at the top of the page here, we’ve relabelled our established Ruby hosting service to “Brightbox Ruby”, to distinguish it from Brightbox Cloud.

Oh, and yes, there will be t-shirts.

Apache Denial-of-Service Vulnerability 2 Sep 11

A bug in the Apache webserver has recently been widely publicised. The bug is very simple to trigger remotely and causes almost-instant memory exhaustion (OOM) on the targeted server, which causes any sites hosted there to be unavailable until the server is restarted.

mitre.org has links to more information about this bug.

Ubuntu released new versions of the Apache packages last night, which contain a fix for this bug.

We recommend that customers who are using Apache on their Brightboxes, should upgrade as soon as reasonably convenient. The default Brightbox install uses Apache, so if you are unsure whether or not this affects you then you should upgrade Apache using the instructions below.

The upgrade requires a restart of Apache, which will momentarily interrupt service. In cases where your Brightboxes are behind a load-balancer, the impact of this is minimal.

We believe the upgrade to be low-risk; we have already upgraded a large number of our own servers today without incident, and the only changes relative to the previous package are this security fix.

The necessary commands are

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install apache2.2-common