Thu, 19 Mar 2015 04:15 AM UTC: This work has been completed. Thanks to all our customers for their patience during this long running task

Update @UTC Mar 07 2000:
Customers with VMs on their own dedicated hosts can initiate their own upgrades via a web interface at http://rimuhosting.com/cp/vps/hsupgrade.jsp

We have updated a good number of hosts to date.  Most of the remaining hosts are on customers dedicated VM hosts.  We will be scheduling those for automatic update shortly (if that those customers opt to not run their own upgrades).

Update @UTC Mar 4 1320: We are scheduling host servers for the upgrade.  See http://rimuhosting.com/cp/hsupgrades.jsp (edit: corrected url) for a list of your affected servers.  If your server is not currently scheduled for an update, then we will schedule that at a later date.  We will email you when we add one of your host servers to the schedule.  Please bear with us as we attempt to get these hosts patched as quickly as possible.

Issue: There are some security issues affected Xen hosts (and thus the VMs that run on those hosts) per http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/

The details are embargoed meaning that the details of the issue cannot be made public.  RimuHosting is on a 'predisclosure' list so we are privy to the details of those issues (and the fixes).  However we are not permitted to disclose any details to our customers (while the issues remain embargoed).

Impact: This affects VMs hosted with us (including those on dedicated host servers).  It excludes regular dedicated servers not running the Xen hypervizor.

Course of action: We will be applying those fixes.  To do that we will stop VMs on a Xen host, install the updated packages and restart the host server.  VMs will come up after the reboot.  Typically it will take 20-60 minutes of downtime to complete this process.

Timing: Because of the nature of the problem we will be doing restarts around the clock on affected hosts.  We will attempt to do those, where possible, outside of business hours at the host server data center location.

We will be updating this notice with more information as our planning and the rollout of the fixes progresses.  Please subscribe to this notice to receive further updates.