Author: Ashley Lipscombe

ams2-c7-1 MariaDB Upgrade

Update 2021-03-07 10:30AM UK: This work has been completed. No major issues have been spotted. Please keep an eye out for any site specific issues on your website. Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience!

Update 2021-03-07 09:45AM UK: This work has begun. A backup of all databases has completed and the MariaDB server is now upgrading. We will provide a further update by 10:30 UK.

Update 2021-03-07 08:30AM UK: This work will begin at 09:30 UK. We will start by taking a backup of all databases. We will provide a further update by 10:00 UK.

Here at Anu, we care deeply about the security of our customer’s data so therefore regularly upgrade our software to newer versions to ensure we are receiving important patches.

We will be upgrading MariaDB on ams2-c7-1 to 10.2 on March 7th, 2021. This will ensure we continue to obtain security fixes until 2022 when we will review and upgrade again as necessary.

Common applications such as WordPress, Magento Drupal and others will already be fully compatible with this so we expect the upgrade to go smoothly and most customers will not to have to do anything.

If you have bespoke applications or if you run legacy versions of open source software then you may need to check if everything will be compatible. You can read more about all changes and improvements, including any breaking changes on the official MariaDB website: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/changes-improvements-in-mariadb-102/

If you have any questions or need any support on this matter, do not hesitate to email support@anu.net and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

UK1 Datacenter

We hope that everybody had a great holiday period given the circumstances and wish you all a happy new year.

Here at Anu we spent a significant chunk of the past few weeks working on our latest growth project, the UK1 Datacenter in Surrey, England.

We own and maintain our own hardware in high security, superior specification facilities so it has been a lot of work planning and executing but we are proud to say that it is now fully operational and ready for use.

If you are an existing customer and would like to migrate to UK1, we would be happy to facilitate this at your request. You can reach our support team by emailing support@anu.net.

If you are interested in high quality managed Linux virtual servers in the UK or in any of our other locations (NL, US, AU, IE) from a single server to a large scale high availability redundant cluster, do not hesitate to speak to our sales team by emailing sales@anu.net.

CentOS 6 End of Life

As of 30th November, 2020, the CentOS 6 operating system is End of Life. This means it will receive no further updates, including security patches.

If your virtual server or hosting account still runs on CentOS 6 or older, we would strongly recommend developing and implementing a mitigation plan as soon as possible. This can be by migrating to a newer operating system or putting appropriate security measures in place.

We have developed a load balancer as a service offering which can be used to protect CentOS 6 environments that need to be maintained for example if the software stack is not compatible with more modern operating systems. This uses a CentOS 7 / 8 load balancer to accept traffic, provides built in SSL / HTTPS and uses the LAN network to access specific applications and services which massively reduces the potential attack surface. We will continue to develop this by adding further performance and security features.

We can also provide bespoke load balancer solutions using CentOS 7 / 8 virtual servers along with web/application servers, database servers and more which can provide a variety of features and security measures such as high availability, IP failover, caching, brute force / vulnerability detection, redirection and more.

If you need any assistance with your CentOS 6 deployments, you can reach out to us by emailing support@anu.net.