V1.01 January 1999
From DreamHost
Table of Contents 0. Introduction. 1. Happy New Year! 2. The cgi change. 3. Progress. 4. Dhsotm January '99. 5. Reminders. 0. Introduction Hello All! Here it is.. the first official Dreamhost Newsletter of new year! So get out of bed, shake off that hangover (still!?) and read it over a nice hot cup of Java. No pun intended! Well, maybe a little. 1. Happy New Year! Well, it is 1999. Only the first day and already it looks like it is shaping up to be a great year for Dreamhost and all our wonderful clients! Get ready this year to be deluded with countless Y2K articles and recaps of the decade/century/millennium. Also get ready for sweeping changes in wireless hand-held devices (thanks to the Qualcomm pdQ), the way web sites work (thanks to Mozilla.org's NGLayout rendering engine), as well as the web hosting industry (thanks to yours truly!). I think we're all pretty excited and optimistic around here about what the new year will bring and we hope you are too! We also have made one New Year's Resolution which I'm sure at least some of you will be very grateful to hear. We will make no changes that in any way affect how you access Dreamhost's services without giving at least two weeks notice via the Discussion Board and possibly a mass emailing. We promise that none of our customers will be caught unaware when we make some new improvement that requires a change on your end. (We'll do our best to minimize these occurrences anyway!) Now let's move on to the rest of this month's installment! 2. Cgi change. The reason we've made this resolution, as I'm sure some of you have surmised, is due to the overall poor way we handled our switching from cgi scripts running as nobody to being run as the user themselves (i.e. enabling suexec). Believe it or not, there are various good reasons for configuring our servers to run this way.. ease of set up for cgi scripts and enhanced security against snoops on the same server as you being the primary ones. There were some unforeseen consequences to this action, however, which caused a few problems for some of our users. Under this new system, it is a requirement that no cgi scripts, OR THE DIRECTORY THEY RESIDE IN be writable by anyone other than their owner. This means using the "chmod 755" command on all scripts and directories. When we made the change, for a few hours we looked at the log file to see where errors were now occurring and we chmoded them appropriately until we seemed to be getting no more errors. So most of the more popular scripts were fixed by us, but we couldn't catch them all. Another change necessitated was the move of the Count.cgi script and formmail.cgi to a central cgi server. This means that your link to Count.cgi must be changed on your web site from just /cgi-bin/Count.cgi to http://counter.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/Count.cgi and that your formmail link must change to http://formmail.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi . This was a bit of an unforeseen effect of the integration of suexec and if we had realized that this big a change would have had to be made, we would have definitely prepared everyone much better than we did. Live and learn. Well that's all pretty much ancient history for everybody now but we thought it would be best if we explained it clearly to everyone. It won't happen again. 3. Progress Things haven't moved as quickly as we had hoped in terms of new services this month due to the holidays and some other issues (cough suexec cough). But! There has been progress, and January will likely prove to be a month with a lot of great new features popping up. Keep checking the web panel (and keep voting for Dreamhost on those links! We really appreciate that!). 4. Dhsotm January '99 Duh duh duh DUN duh duh! The first Dreamhost Site of the Month award for 1999 is proudly provided to http://wooferxp.com/! Make sure you have your sound on as well as a nice 4.0 browser to view this one! Still no nice logo to show you were awarded the Dhsotm.. if someone would like to design one and email it to dhsotm@dreamhost.com we'll give them a $50 account credit if we use it! Don't forget to submit your site to that same address to get a chance at being the lucky one for February.. and thanks to all who applied in December! 5. Reminders Just some reminders for everybody.. Don't forget the way to get tech support is through https://secure.newdream.net/admin/support.cgi (or http://scripts.dreamhost.com/support.cgi if your browser doesn't support SSL) Please don't email sales@dreamhost.com or suggestions@dreamhost.com with customer service inquiries.. it just makes it a bear for us to keep requests organized so we can reply to them all as quickly as possible. Also a note.. it looks like there was some kind of problem with our replies to tech support over the last few days and a few of you never received the responses we sent... and understandably got mad at the lack of a response. We are working furiously to find out why those emails never reached you and making sure it doesn't repeat. Don't forget you can get a $50 credit to your account by sending us a suggestion at suggestions@dreamhost.com. Don't forget to update your links to http://counter.dreamhost.com/cgi- bin/Count.cgi and http://formmail.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi See you next time and happy 1999!
