So -- we're coming quickly to the end. Cruiskeen Consulting has ended all support contracts, and we are down to one hosting client, who should be off of our servers by the end of this week. I've appreciated all of the support and business over the years, and how gracious (mostly) all of my clients have been. Now if only I can figure out what to do with all of these slightly-long-in-the-tooth servers.
I have been the sole owner of Cruiskeen Consulting LLC since it started. I've reached retirement age and have decided that 10 years of building this company has been enough. I am planning to retire in early 2019 and therefore am putting the company on a retirement plan as well. My plan is to stop all hosting and support services from Cruiskeen Consulting LLC by January of 2019. We are working on transition plans with all current clients, but are no longer accepting new orders for hosting or support contracts.
This has been a difficult decision, but I felt it was best to simply shut down rather than attempt to sell to another company. This way all hosting and support will be in the hands of our current customers.
It has been a great run. I am looking forward to working on some personal projects, technical and otherwise, as well as being able to travel and do other things that have been next to impossible for the owner of a small agency.
Critical updates are being released for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 today between 1 and 2:30 PM Central Time. We take this one particularly seriously and will be spending most of the afternoon doing updates to our clients who are on maintenance for Drupal. We expect to have these all done within a few hours, although those clients running Drupal Distributions or Drupal 6 may have to wait a while for all of the software to be released on these platforms.
You may have seen some of the recent media coverage of these two processor vulnerabilities. Meltdown affects almost all Intel processors even someone my age can remember. Spectre affects to varying degress both AMD and Intel processors.
We are teaming up with Weebly to pvoide you with a simple web builder. Not all sites need the power of a full CMS system. Some time before June 1 we will be offering a special series of Weebly-based hosting plans that let you build simple web sites with the Weebly site builder, while still hosting your sites with us. We are working on clearing up some of the issues of making this totally transparent and easy. Plans will start under $10/month for the site buildier and hosting. Even the smallest plan will include e-commerce capabilities. More on this in a week or two.
There will be an important security release of contrib modlules at 11 AM Central time today. Yes, in a few minutes. We're ready to start doing a rollout of these to our clients who are on security contracts. Some of these are very high-importance updates, so we strongly recommend that EVERYONE with a Drupal site install these updates as quickly as possible, since past experience has shown that these high-visiblity updates are often exploited within hours.
Drupal Camp Wisconsin is on! and will be held on July 29-30 in beautiful Madison Wisconsin. This year we will be meeting at the Chemistry biulding on the UW Campus. There are still open slots for presentations --- so please stop by at http://drupalcampwi.org or make a session proposal, or to sign up for the camp. This is always a fun camp, and it did not happen last year, so this is the year to stop by and make Drupal Camp Wisconsin a success! See you there.
Everyone in the world is back from Drupalcon - full of seafood and other New Orleans specialties, and tired after all the great ideas and --- netowrking. So things are slowly getting back to normal here at the farm as this video will attest. Unpacking and getting back to work. And yes, I DO look a lot like Gene Autrey - it never occurred to me before I watched the video.
Update --- all of our servers are now fully patched with the recently released updates for ImageMagick -
The talk of the Internet for the last few days has been a new exploit termed ImageTragick - CVE-2016–3714. It's a potential exploit on any server with the ImageMagick package installed that runs web apps that do not check properly for file type before displaying a file manipulated through the Convert command. It doesn't look like Drupal is VERY exploitable by this (and would only be exploitable if the site used ImageMagick, which is not a lot of them. Wordpress will also only be vulnerable if it uses an extension that calls ImageMagick.
However, since our clients run all sorts of code on our servers, we have just taken steps to mitigate this vulnerability on all of our servers. We don't think this will have any bad effects on any production sites - but if you're suddenly having issues with image processing, this may be why. We've patched the policy.xml file on all of the servers as suggested by Red Hat and CentOS. This should stop any potential exploits until such time that actual patches for ImageMagick are available that are known to actually fix the exploit - probably next week.
We're separating our web presence into two different places. This has been in the works for some time now, and we're finally moving forward on it. You can now purchase web hosting, domains, certificates, etc. through our new front-end web site at http://www.cms-farm.com . The site is still being developed, but it should make it easier to find your web hosting and service choices. Web development and consulting will still be run from this site.
