A maintenance window has been set tonight September 20th between 11:30 PM – 3 AM EDT (-0400 GMT). The window should be non-disruptive to all services. During this window the following changes will be pushed to the servers:

  • Removed artifically low hard limit on Dovecot processes (32). Dovecot likes to be a little too liberal in its connection estimates and overcompensates with spare workers. During times of high volume, several idle workers spin-up waiting to resume resulting in starvation.
  • Standardized Apache configuration files across servers
  • Bumped mod_frontpage after mod_cgi was loaded in Apache to avoid segfaults (possibly a result of my “patch”)
  • Relaxed threshold to trigger mod_evasive 403 redirects in Apache. Doubled threshold and increased interval from 1 to 2 seconds to ensure large pages with multiple cached items won’t result in false-positives
  • Flush Dovecot’s auth cache once a user is deleted. Fixes rare circumstances where user would be deleted and recreated in the control panel (guys, that’s not a not great fix for a user going over disk quota). Dovecot held onto old uid mapping resulting in permission mismatch after successful authentication.
  • Added extra set of customizable Apache parameters which apply only to SSL sites.  Used primarily for chained SSL certificates at this time.

12:32 AM Update: maintenance window is now closed.

Internal server changes