The 2020s are right around the corner! Next year will bring many exciting world events, including the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, and in the U.S. politics will be at
Best wishes for the new decade, and news about a WebCrossing Server Security Upgrade for 2020
The 2020s are right around the corner! Next year will bring many exciting world events, including the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, and in the U.S. politics will be at a peak as a new presidential election season gets under way.
We wish our customers, our friends, our colleagues, and their families the warmest wishes for this holiday season, and look forward to continue serving you in the next decade, improving our software, and providing you the best support we can.
Have a great New Year holiday, blessed Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and see you all in the 2020s!
Are you ready for the 2020s? WebCrossing is.
Starting in January, 2020 the major browsers will be enforcing stricter security and rejecting https connections to old SSL/TLS protocols. The current secure https version is TLS 1.2.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla announced over a year ago that they will end support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 and will disable support for those encrypted protocols in Chrome, Edge, IE, Firefox, and Safari in 2020. Note that January 19, 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of TLS 1.0.
WebCrossing has supported both TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 since June, 2018. In this release, we are applying the advice of security experts and (1) Updating the latest OpenSSL implementation of TLS and (2) Disabling TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Security testing sites will rate your site’s secure connections based on whether you require newer, secure browsers. This new release of WebCrossing is rated A.
A small fraction of very old user browsers don’t support TLS 1.2. Almost all the world’s secure traffic is driven on TLS 1.2 now. Users with extremely old browsers (less than 0.5% of users) will need to upgrade their browser versions in 2020.
If you are using secure connections (https vs http) for your site, we highly recommend upgrading to the latest version. If you are not using secure connections, we recommend you do. These days browsers are getting more and more fussy about connecting to servers which are not secure, and this will be even more so in 2020.
The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1353 2019-12-11.
All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.
If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.
WebCrossing Server Security Upgrade
We think it is vital these days to keep up with the latest security releases and incorporate them in the core WebCrossing server. This new version updates secure connections with an update to the latest OpenSSL libraries for the latest TLS specs.
To be technical about it, the relevant changes in the latest version (1) Enable SHA3 pre-hashing for ECDSA and DSA and (2) Prevent over long nonces in ChaCha20-Poly1305. The new version passes all security checks with an A rating.
If you are using secure connections (https vs http) for your site, we highly recommend upgrading to the latest version. If you are not using secure connections, we recommend you do. These days browsers are getting more and more fussy about connecting to servers which are not secure.
The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1351 2019-07-01.
All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.
If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.
WebCrossing Server Maintenance Upgrade
This new version is useful for sites doing maintenance, such as database repacks. The database backup period field is now saved to webx.set and can be used to override the WebCrossing database setting in the Control Panel. This is helpful when you want to suspend backups while working on DB export or other offline maintenance.
The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1350 2019-06-06.
All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.
If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.
WebCrossing Server Security Upgrade
We always try to stay on top of security! This new version includes the latest SSL security upgrades, and ensures we maintain our “A” rating from testing sites, such as SSL Labs.
Specifically, the new upgrade deals with these previously known issues: Timing vulnerability in DSA signature generation; Timing vulnerability in ECDSA signature generation; Fixed a bug in DTLS over SCTP which broke interoperability with older versions of OpenSSL like OpenSSL 1.1.0 and OpenSSL 1.0.2; Changed the info callback signals for the start and end of a post-handshake message exchange in TLSv1.3;
If you are interested in using SSL encryption for the security of your site we recommend this upgrade.
The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1349 2019-03-19.
All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.
If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.
WebCrossing Server Maintenance Upgrade
The purpose of this update is to make it easier for large sites to do a database repack offline without worrying about a live server’s daily backup interfering in the meanwhile. The new feature is a “suspend backups for 10 days” option to ensure the roll-forward file keeps on growing until the repack is done.
This is rather technical. Please bear with me as I explain!
Regular maintenance of large databases is highly recommended. One maintenance activity is “repacking” – a procedure which can substantially reduce the size of a database by reclaiming space no longer in use. While a certain amount of database re-use occurs automatically, repacking actually helps reducethe total size of the database.
Repacking can be done offline on a separate server, to avoid impacting on the live server process. During repacking it is best to suspend daily backups. When repacking is completed, you can then update your server with the repacked database and it will include transactions which occurred during the repack by reading in the roll-forward filing containing those transactions. So it’s important to ensure that your roll-forward transactions continue to get recording normally until the last step.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but are interested in doing a repack of your large database then please contact support and we will help you if you have an up-to-date maintenance agreement or are hosted in one of our data centers.
The latest release version is now WebCrossing 6.4-1348 2019-02-18.
All self-hosted customers with valid support and maintenance contracts can download this new version at no cost.
If you are a self-hosted customer and have a valid support and maintenance contract, please contact support for access to the new server. If your support and maintenance contract has expired, please contact us to renew so we can provide you with this important update.
