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 […]

Apr 26, 2025

We do monitor the support calls we receive as it helps us identify where people are having trouble using our applications.  Over the last few years there have been numerous instances where a school has tried to use the teacher’s year level selection to control which booking round they appear in.   Unfortunately the year levels […]

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 […]

Apr 24, 2024

We’ve made some changes to the way you enter calendar events, hopefully this will simplify the process.  The main changes are around the specification of additional dates and times for an event, ie an event that spans multiple days, or is a part day event. A simple one-day event By default the date you click […]