IS-3712 Maintenance

July 28th, 2010

We will be carrying out essential maintenance on server IS-3712 which supplies MySQL and FTP services for shared hosting clients tomorrow (29th July) morning at 1am.

The work should not last more than 15 minutes but FTP and connections to MySQL databases on this server will not be available for the duration of the work.

We apologise for the short notice but an issue has been identified with the NIC card on this server and is therefore a high priority to replace it before a possible failure occurs.

Update 02:15 – This work was completed successfully.

Windows Server Reboots

July 23rd, 2010

We are applying some critical patches to the Windows servers which will mean each server will be unavailable for a few minutes whilst it reboots.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Linux Server IS-08532 Maintenance

June 30th, 2010

Users may experience a slight slowdown in performance and/or network connectivity issues for IS-08532 for the next 20 minutes.

This is because we are carrying out essential server maintenance that could not be scheduled due to it’s importance.

This work should be completed shortly…

Planned Network Maintenance

June 29th, 2010

We will be carrying out maintenance which is applicable to some of your services with us.

Maintenance Type: Network
Expected effect on your service: Small Degradation in Performance
Expected downtime duration: 0 minutes
This will occur between 08:00 and 17:00 on 30/06/2010 (UK Time)

The following servers are relevant to this message:

IS-03093, IS-03384, IS-03587, IS-03711, IS-03712, IS-03713, IS-03714, IS-03715, IS-03716, IS-03717, IS-03718, IS-03719, IS-05965, IS-06110, IS-07420, IS-07759, IS-07931, IS-08077, IS-08313, IS-08532, IS-08817, IS-08859, IS-08985, IS-09830, IS-09906, IS-10952, IS-11329, IS-11743, IS-11959

This is an emergency maintenance required to change the route for one of our fibre uplinks. During the maintenance period there will be a small degradation in performance but there will be no connectivity interruption.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.

Scheduled UPS Maintenance

June 15th, 2010

Maintenance Type: Infrastructure
Expected effect on your service: No Effect
Expected downtime duration: 0 minutes
This will occur between 08:00 and 18:00 on 05/07/2010 (UK Time)

The following servers are relevant to this message:

IS-03093, IS-03384, IS-03587, IS-03711, IS-03712, IS-03713, IS-03714, IS-03715, IS-03716, IS-03717, IS-03718, IS-03719, IS-05965, IS-06110, IS-07420, IS-07759, IS-07931, IS-08077, IS-08313, IS-08532, IS-08817, IS-08859, IS-08985, IS-09830, IS-09906, IS-10952, IS-11329, IS-11743

On the 5th of July 2010 there will be a maintenance window to expand the capacity of the UPS systems. An additional UPS control unit and its associated batteries will be added to the existing cluster. This is to ensure the UPS system continues to provide fully redundant power backup as the site grows. This work creates an “at risk” period for your service. This maintenance is not service-affecting, but during the maintenance period services are at an increased risk.

During the maintenance period the critical load will be transferred seamlessly from the UPS to the raw mains. When the maintenance is complete it will be transferred back seamlessly.

We have confirmed with Southern Electric that they have no maintenance scheduled during this period.

Notification of Scheduled Maintenance

June 7th, 2010

Please note we will be carrying out minor upgrade to our server network which will affect shared/reseller clients and certain dedicated server clients. The details are:

Maintenance Type: Network
Expected effect on your service: Connectivity Interruption
Expected downtime duration: 15 minutes
This will occur between 05:30 and 08:30 on 15/06/2010 (UK Time)

The following servers are relevant to this message:

IS-03093, IS-03384, IS-03587, IS-03711, IS-03712, IS-03713, IS-03714, IS-03715, IS-03716, IS-03717, IS-03718, IS-03719, IS-05965, IS-06110, IS-07420, IS-07759, IS-07931, IS-08077, IS-08313, IS-08532, IS-08817, IS-08859, IS-08985, IS-09830, IS-09906, IS-10952, IS-11329, IS-11743

This maintenance is to enable a service on the VSS-1440 cluster in order to upgrade the available number of VLANS.

This will restart one of the services on the VSS-1440 cluster, which will cause a short network interruption.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.

Unscheduled Network Outage

May 25th, 2010

The data centre our dedicated servers are located within suffered an unscheduled network outage last night.  Repost as follows:

Date: 25/05/2010
Time: 00:20
Outage Type: Connectivity Interruption
Duration: < 75 minutes
Affected Service(s): All dedicated servers

At approximately 00:20 a network issue was detected affecting connectivity to the North cluster in RS Spectrum House. The cause of this appears to have been a very large amount of malicious traffic directed at the RS network. This traffic has unfortunately caused a routing issue within the RSH.North cluster.

Our on call engineers were contacted and the traffic has been removed from the network. Normal service was restored at approximately 01:35. This problem will have affected different clients in different ways. It will have ranged from no effect, to an increase in latency and some packet loss, to a more substantial loss of connectivity.

We would like to express our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this will have caused. If you are experiencing any problems as a result of this please do not hesitate to contact our support team immediately and we will look into this for you.

At this time we do not have any further updates from the data centre but we will post them here once they arrive.

Migration of Open Mind Hosting

May 19th, 2010

We are currently migrating the primary Open Mind Hosting domain to a new server so you may experience minor issues accessing your account whilst the IP changes propagate.

This should be fully resolved within 24 hours.

Mail Server Update 22:14 – All Clear

April 26th, 2010

All mail has now left the backup mail server and systems are running normally.  The migration is complete and we can now issue the all clear.

Many thanks for your patience in what was a very smooth migration.

Mail Server Update 20:12 – Restoration Complete

April 26th, 2010

Account restoration has now completed and access to the Helm control panel has been restored.

We are currently checking migrated information to ensure everything is running smoothly before giving the all clear.

At this stage though, everything seems to be running well and migration appears to have been a great success with greatly reduced resource usage on the new mail server meaning faster access via webmail as well as an increase in the delivery speed of email to users accounts.