A very substantial proportion of websites are based on PHP (Pre-processed Hypertext Protocol), so it's always important to stand-up and take notice when a critical PHP issue is patched.

Today is one of those days, with a second update issued to fix a criticial remote execution vulnerability. The vulnerability means that an attacker could potentially run unauthorised code on your server, something nobody wants! Attacks have already been detected in the wild by various honeypot services, so it's absolutely critical that everyone updates as soon as possible.

All Virya Technologies customers are advised to check which version of PHP they are currently running and to update where necessary, the latest versions  are 5.4.36 or 5.3.13. All earlier versions must be considered vulnerable.

We were contacted by a company who have several dedicated servers using the Plesk interface provided by Parallels to manage the user interface (a common alternative to CPanel).  Their server had been taken down as it had been compromised via a recently released, critical vulnerability with Parallels Plesk affecting versions 7.6.1 – 10.3.1.

Joomla! 1.6 requires PHP 5.3 or later to be installed. When requesting a new server, this is far less of a problem as many will be provisioned with PHP 5.3 already installed. What should you do, however, if you are running a version of CentOS prior to 5.6 you will need to manually update PHP before Joomla 1.6 will install.

In fact, even with Joomla 1.5 you may experience issues if you are running an earlier version of PHP. The latest build of Akeeba Backup, for example, requires PHP 5.3.

This post will detail the method you need to use to update from PHP 5.1 or 5.2 to PHP 5.3 (Note: These instructions should not be followed to update from PHP4 unless you know exactly what you are doing!)

We received a call just after midnight from a server administrator who was having difficulties with his mail server - to the point that his international clients were unable to receive email at the middle of their peak period.  Nobody else picked up the phone ... we did!