12-02-2003: NOTICE of major policy change in periodic hosting charges.

In an effort to reduce inflating costs of conducting business and improving the speed, userfriendliness, and reliability of our period hosting charge schedule The Craft Brothers are making a major change in the handling of our credit card transactions and associated systems. We are ending our affiliation with our current credit card processor and will be integrating and implementing PayPal (www.paypal.com) payment systems to handle collection of funds.

The former processor was costly and limited our clients to payment via VISA or MASTERCARD only. The new solution will expand the payment options to include DISCOVER and AMERICAN EXPRESS as well as payment using one's personal or business bank account.

SMOOTH MIGRATION:

Clients currently setup to pay via credit card will receive another email when their account is due for renewal ON or AFTER. Instructions will be provided to guide you through the payment process. Clients who have negotiated other payment arrangements (i.e.: Postal billing) should take note that credit card transactions will no longer be processed from mail-in payments. The credit card informatin section of our invoices will soon be converted to instructions for posting online payments.

We anticipate that this migration will be a relatively simple for our clients and ask for your patience as we iron out any wrinkles. Should you have questions, email cservice@craftbros.net.

02-07-2003: Shell access is now restricted to SSH only

Due to concerns over the security of unencrypted shell sessions conducted over telnet connections, The Craft Brothers has restricted the access to shell accounts. The Telnet daemon has been disabled so that shell connections can only be made via Secure SHell (SSH). For Microsoft Windows users, we recommend OpenSSH as it seems to work very well with our servers.

12-29-2002: NMS Formmail now installed by default

Within 5 to 10 minutes of all new accounts being created, the NMS version of formmail is installed into the cgi-bin automatically.

06-19-2002: NMS Formmail replacement REQUIRED

Due to the large amounts of SPAM email being sent through our servers as a result of insecure versions of Matt's Formmail being run on user accounts, The Craft Brothers have now mandated that all accounts on our servers, regardless of geographic location now use only an NMS distributed FormMail script.

All accounts currently hosted on the Penguin server at the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida location have automatically had their formmail scripts updated to the latest NMS distribution. Since the NMS distribution is a direct replacement for Matt's FormMail, you should experience little to no difficulty with the new replacement. However, due to the secure nature of the NMS formmail script, there are limitations on both WHERE the script will allow emails to be sent and WHERE form submissions are coming from (referer) you may find that the new script is rejecting your form submission. In this case, please consult the NMS website for details on how to configure the NMS FormMail script.

Visit the NMS website for script information and usage: nms-cgi.sourceforge.net

For those accounts hosted at the Kansas City, MO data center, your formmail script will be updated by the staff of The Craft Brothers within the next few days.

All new accounts will be advised to use the NMS formmail distribution.

Liability: Any account found to be using an insecure formmail script will be subject to account cancellation or suspension without refrund. The account in question will be liable for any and all expenses incurred by The Craft Brothers due to consequenses incurred from the use of an insecure script.