Dear customer,
For users of our shared and reseller hosting, this announcement is to inform you that we have upgraded to PHP 5.2.12 and MySQL 5.1.40 on our Yoda server. The PHP upgrade is just a minor upgrade, and should have little effect on your scripts. MySQL 5.1, however, is a major new revision of the MySQL database server, and includes performance enhancements as well as several new features, which you can read about on the MySQL web site if desired.
If you are now receiving connection errors for databases that previously worked, it may be that you are attempting to use a username longer than 16 characters. MySQL has limited usernames to 16 characters for many years. In versions of MySQL prior to 5.1, when a login username longer than 16 characters was sent to the server it was silently truncated to the 16 characters limit. In MySQL 5.1, all characters submitted for the username are checked during authentication. This change means that any user submitting more than 16 characters as their login username will fail to authenticate once the server is upgraded. To correct this problem, you should modify your scripts to only send the first 16 characters of the login username.
Currently, this update has only been performed on the Yoda server, but we intend to upgrade our US-based servers, Aslan and Davros, within 48 hours. There may be a short period of disruption to PHP-based sites while the upgrade takes place; no more than 30 minutes at the most. We will aim to perform the upgrade at a time that will cause the least disruption to your web sites.
If you have any problems following this update, please submit a support ticket at https://www.zernebok.com/members/.
Regards,
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Owen Rudge
Zernebok Hosting, Ltd.
Monday, December 21, 2009
