Feb 20, 2026

Impacted sobs.com.au : service was unavailable for 18 minutes eq.sobs.com.au : regular service was maintained There was an error with the firewall on this server that resulted in limited access for us to perform any updates, investigation and maintenance.  These are important services and we have been working on the issue for one week.  This […]

Jan 16, 2026

ISO/IEC 27001 is the leading international standard for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to systematically protect an organisation’s information assets, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability by managing risks to data, people, processes, and technology. Certification demonstrates commitment to best practices, building customer trust and competitive advantage by showing […]

Oct 15, 2025

We have been working to harden our application security.  As part of this process we have been looking at our passwords, and ensuring they are HASHED, SALTED and STRETCHED.  Who knew you could hash salt and stretch a password, but apparently you can. Some history When we first released SOBS back in 2007 we didn’t […]

May 12, 2025

Hi folks It is about 8pm on Monday the 12th of May. Sorry if this is inconvenient but it’s a necessary upgrade that I have been putting off for a while.  We’re moving from SimpleSAMLPHP verson 1 to version 2.  There are a number of changes that we are working through and hope to have […]

Jul 18, 2024

This outage lasted just 4 minutes. It was entirely my fault – I was adding some configuration to the web server and got the settings wrong.  It took me 4 minutes to undo the changes and get the web server restarted. I will reschedule this work for outside of regular hours.

Jun 14, 2024

A PHP vulnerability was recently published, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-4577 SOBS IS NOT AFFECTED More information This vulnerability only affects Windows computers running Apache, PHP-CGI and PHP scripts. Our servers are running Linux and we do not use PHP-CGI. We do regularly conduct penetration tests on our SOBS services to ensure our servers are secure and your data […]

Jun 6, 2024

Our certificates expired. I had previously renewed the certificates and installed them on the web servers, however i needed to update the references to the new certificates and restart the web service.  Sorry, it had been on my list of tasks, I thought it had been done but as it turned out it hadn’t. Everything […]

Jun 4, 2024

Sorry, my mistake. While the application was generally still available, some functions were interrupted by two new tables being added to the application.  This caused an error in the library loading the appropriate classes.  As soon as we realised there was an error it was a quick resolution.  We apologise for those people who were […]

Feb 8, 2024

We have four different authentication methods: SAML, LDAP, User/Password, LocalAuthentication. SAML: This is our preferred option and the one that works best for schools.  It means each staff member only has to remember a single username and password which they use to log into their primary authentication system, and then every other application recognises the […]

Aug 21, 2023

Friday 18-8-2023 The ability to send SMS messages is currently unavailable.  All of our SMS functionality is directed via Infoways, and they are currently having issues delivering these messages into the mobile network.  They are aware of the problem and are working on it. Update: Monday 21-8-2023 8:49am The SMS facility is still currently unavailable.  […]