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BOA-5.8.5 — Devuan Excalibur and PHP 8.5

BOA-5.8.5 — Devuan Excalibur and PHP 8.5

30 Years of Heritage -- Why We’re Different

We are unique within the hosting industry for many important reasons.

Our 15 years of Ægir-based hosting, plus earlier experience with Adgrafix (the first company to offer a control panel for website management in 1995), have helped shape what makes us different today.

We take Open Source seriously, it's not a buzzword for us. It's about freedom from corporate control. Here's a short look back at our 15-year Ægir journey and 19 years with Drupal.

Read the full story: https://bit.ly/different30y

The Future of Ægir 3 is Bryght!

Omega8.cc is now the lead developer team for Ægir 3 running on BOA (Barracuda-Octopus-Ægir stack). We want to thank all past contributors who brought Ægir to life – your work makes today’s progress possible.

Because of you, there is still a Bryght Future for Ægir. What to Expect?

Read the full story: https://bit.ly/aegirbryghtfuture

New BOA-5.8.5 PRO/LTS Release

The future of Drupal hosting is here! With BOA-5.8.5 PRO/LTS, we proudly deliver both full Drupal 11 support integrated with Ægir and latest PHP 8.5, now available on the latest Devuan Excalibur / Debian Trixie system.

This groundbreaking feature not only pushes the boundaries of what the BOA can achieve but also reaffirms our commitment to staying ahead of the curve for modern Drupal deployments.

Powered by Percona 8.4 and fine-tuned to leverage the latest innovations across the stack, this update sets a new standard for hosting next-generation Drupal applications while continuing to fully support legacy Drupal versions, ensuring smooth operations for every site in your ecosystem, old or new.

We are thrilled to introduce BOA-5.8.5 PRO/LTS, our 7th release under the new branch structure and dual licensing model. It merges four months of intense development from the DEV branch, delivering 1092 commits packed with powerful features, critical fixes, and enhancements.

Thank you to everyone who supports our work by purchasing a BOA PRO license: https://omega8.cc/boapro.

As always, this announcement highlights only the most impactful changes. For a full breakdown, explore the complete commit history.

Key Improvements Explained

  • Any expected downtime during barracuda system upgrades has been reduced from 2-3 minutes to 10-14 seconds on average thanks to our improvements across the board in the BOA system logic.

  • BOA now consistently pauses Ægir tasks queue if any system-backend tasks are running -- this includes any barracuda/octopus upgrades, the heavy daily.sh script and nightly DB backups, so no Ægir tasks should ever collide with those important system tasks.

  • The auto-healing system has been rewritten from scratch and greatly improved for precision, stability and protection from race conditions, with added smart cooldown pause to avoid unnecessary interventions.

  • The _SKYNET_MODE=OFF now strictly blocks any updates otherwise applied via the autoupboa tool running every 6 minutes, but also blocks any attempt to run barracuda or octopus upgrades, even if invoked manually.

  • Many vendor-specific issues affecting BOA installation on VPS platforms have been addressed for both older and newer Devuan/Debian releases, especially for the autoinit procedure recommended as the first step.

  • We no longer hardcode Devuan's own APT sources lottery alias deb.devuan.org and instead test and pick reputable mirrors to use the fastest in the given server's location.

  • We limit the messaging noise generated by various parts of the new auto-healing system by switching the _INCIDENT_REPORT to NO by default, so only really critical incidents like service restarts caused by OOM (out of memory) incidents are still reported.

  • The legacy _XTRAS_LIST logic has been improved with changes documented. Now _XTRAS_LIST is by default EMPTY and extended only minimally depending on mode, so almost no BOA xtras are installed by default like before.

  • The _CUSTOM_CONFIG_CSF should protect only /etc/csf/csf.conf. Previously it blocked CSF/LFD upgrades completely while it should protect only the main config file. If the protected config file becomes incompatible as a result, it’s the system admin's responsibility to update it manually.

  • New control file /root/.dont.touch.permissions.cnf allows blocking any otherwise defined/run actions globally by taking precedence over any other settings in .barracuda.cnf and site/platform-level INI files.

For the full scoop, check out the changelog.

Thank You!

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