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This morning I moved the database backing the Muonics web site to a new server–part of our on-going (but thankfully almost complete!) IT infrastructure upgrades that have been consuming so much of my time of late. I haven’t seen any problems with the site yet, but if you notice any that aren’t resolved quickly, please do let me know (either by comment or email to support).

The web site itself will also be moving to a new server soon, once we’ve got email services integrated with our LDAP server (another of many upgrades to our internal systems I hope to write about in the articles section soon). Then we can retire the old server hardware that’s been in operation since 2001 when our flagship product, MIB Smithy, was just a spark of an idea.

I’m totally amped to get the last of this migration done. For one thing, I’ve been feeling a bit down on myself for getting behind on product development and neglecting to get the articles section rolling (too many commitments over the last year or two), and it will free up time to get back into it. But mainly I’m amped because of all the potential for reducing drag.

Internally, I’m looking forward a ton of automation, ability to handle and delegate to more staff, room for expansion, speed and capabilities that moving all our x86 platforms to high-end hardware running VMware Server will provide.

Externally, you can soon expect IPv6 and 64-bit platform support for our products and speeding our release cycle back up. We’re bringing the popular FogBugz bug/support tracker online with the last bit of web/email server migration, and I hope to have it integrated directly into our products soon thereafter. Since we’ve outgrown our current bug/feature tracking systems, and email inquiries aren’t currently handled directly through a tracker, this should be a big improvement in our planning, scheduling, and handling of such inquiries.

Overall I’m excited because all of these changes, while they’ve been time consuming and occasionally frustrating, represent a whole new chapter for Muonics: one that will feel to me much less like a startup and much more like a well-oiled machine.

MIB Smithy 4.0.8 provides bug fixes for the following issues:

• The right-click popup menu in the Project Tree will no longer show for Type/Value Assignment virtual folders as it was actually showing the menu for the module. Consequently, selecting “Remove” would remove the module, rather than all Type/Value Assignments as one might expect.
• A “record search string is ambiguous” error would occur when sorting OIDs for generating some output formats if the name assigned to one of those OIDs was also used in another module.
• An “invalid command name” error could occur when trying to show the calendar popup for REVISION and LAST-UPDATED timestamps due to a trace not being removed after the popup is hidden.
• Removed conversion of spaces to HTML entities in help file:// URLs under Windows to prevent errors launching help when MSIE 7 is the default browser.

It took a bit longer than I’d expected to get our SSL certificate replaced, but we received the new certificate this morning, the server software’s been rebuilt, keys changed, etc. The SSL server is back online, and users may once again log in to their accounts and use the shopping cart to make purchases.

Once again I would like to apologize for the inconvenienced caused by the downtime.

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO

This is an update to the security notice sent out Thursday, February 21, 2008.

After reviewing security logs and comparing file systems and source code to known backups as part of our security audit, we are relieved to report that we have not found any evidence that any systems or customer information were successfully compromised during the period that firewall rules were partially disabled and some internet-facing systems were under attack. Additionally it appears that at least some of what was reported as an attack was the work of worms targeting Windows vulnerabilities, which we do not use for our servers–traffic we do not normally see due to firewalls and other protections.

The main avenue for attack that we were most concerned with was certain systems that were being brought up to migrate services to that might not have been fully patched or locked down yet while they were in transition. Though it doesn’t appear there’s been any compromise, as an added precaution, we will still be reinstalling these systems and services, so you may expect some brief periods of down time over the weekend (much of this we’re doing anyway, to sync up deployed software versions with versions being installed on the new systems to ease transition). We’re also revoking all authentication and encryption keys and have requested a new SSL certificate, and will take additional steps to improve our auditing procedures and response time.

Once we have finished upgrading critical server software and have received the new SSL certificate, we will bring the shopping system back online. You will not be able to log into your Muonics web site account until this time.

Please accept our apology for any inconvenience or worry caused by our previous notice and the downtime involved. Though it appears to have been a false alarm, one can never be too cautious about these things.

Should you have any lingering concerns, we will be more than happy to reimburse anyone who has placed orders with us online, at any time in the past, for up to 12 months of credit activity monitoring from your choice of provider. You can contact me directly by phone or email any time between now and March 31, 2008 to arrange.

Thank you for your patience.

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO

Continue reading Security Notice (Updated)

An unknown variable error that would occur when adding a MIB if either a file with the same name was already added or if copying/linking the file into the mibs directory failed, rather than the intended dialog, and was corrected in this release.