NinerNet Communications™
System Status

Server and System Status

NC036: Planned data centre maintenance

15 February 2024 05:14:21 +0000

There is planned network maintenance, “to improve performance and scalability”, for the data centre in Amsterdam where server NC036 (our primary mail server) is located. This maintenance is not expected to result in any downtime, but if any issues arise “affected [servers] may experience increased latency or a brief disruption in network traffic.” This will take place on Tuesday 27 February 2024 from 16:00 to 20:00 UTC. This is 08:00 to 12:00 Pacific Time and 18:00 to 22:00 Central Africa Time on the same date.

If you’d like to calculate this for any other location, please use the World Time Server.

We only post this to ensure you’re aware of the reason for any possible issues in advance. However, based on previous experience, we don’t anticipate any issues.

If you have any questions, please do contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

NC036: Network issue at data centre

9 January 2024 04:55:27 +0000

Server NC036, our primary mail server, was apparently down for 34 minutes yesterday, 8 January. Our server itself was not down, but the data centre experienced what seems to have been a partial connectivity issue. In fact, you may not even have noticed it, as we didn’t receive any complaints about the downtime.

According to the data centre’s report, the issue was resolved and it is not expected to recur. We apologise to anyone who was affected.

NC036: Connectivity problems in Zambia

18 May 2023 19:54:44 +0000

Today we received a number of complaints of connectivity problems to our mail server. However, they were all from Zambia, from the Luangwa Valley to the Copperbelt to Lusaka; nobody else had any issues.

Below is a screenshot of NinerNet’s live status page that was taken moments ago that shows that the mail server (NC036) has been up for 100% of the last 90 days.

NinerNet live status screenshot, 2023-05-18.

NinerNet live status screenshot, 2023-05-18.

In the absence of any other information we can only assume that there was some sort of widespread, country-wide connectivity problem in Zambia late today, for which NinerNet is clearly not responsible. The NinerNet mail servers continued to process inbound email during this time, so even if you couldn’t connect to the mail server, incoming email to you was still collecting on the mail server for your eventual collection.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.


Update, 2023-05-19: One of our clients contacted a Zambian ISP and the problem was blamed on Zambia’s international gateway. Sorry for that!

NC036: Messages to Outlook-/Microsoft-/Hotmail-hosted domains delayed

6 July 2022 09:12:00 +0000

Please note that we are seeing messages from NC036 destined for private domains hosted by Microsoft delayed at this time. The cause is not clear, but it’s clearly on Microsoft’s end.

This is not in any way related to the internal server issue that happened yesterday.

NC036: Issue resolved

5 July 2022 23:54:13 +0000

The issue now appears to be completely resolved. If you’re having any email issues, please do contact NinerNet support and we will look into them. Thank-you.

NC036: Server is up, but some issues

5 July 2022 23:09:28 +0000

We have been informed by the data centre where server NC036 is located that, due to “an effect from ongoing data centre maintenance”, there are connectivity issues. We have been noticing intermittent issues with both direct email connections and the webmail, notably slower transactions (e.g., deleting messages, scanning multiple folders, etc.). However, email is still flowing as usual, perhaps with minor delays.

We have opened a ticket with the data centre to determine why the issues are ongoing. We will update you as we receive more information.

NC036: Disk space issue resolved

8 May 2022 06:19:09 +0000

Briefly between Saturday and Sunday the disk storing emails on server NC036 became full. This was resolved immediately upon discovery, but some incoming emails were delayed. Some may also have bounced. However, this issue is now fully resolved.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support.

NC036: Maintenance port-mortem

16 October 2021 10:41:00 +0000

As stated previously, the maintenance on server NC036 is complete, and has been successful.

That said, it had to be carried out earlier than scheduled because disk space on the server was the issue that was causing a problem. To be clear, the disk space used by email accounts was not and is not the issue (that’s on a separate disk), it was the disk space used by the operating system and the logs in particular. When this problem was noticed earlier this week we projected that addressing the issue during our regular weekend maintenance window on Saturday evening UTC would be sufficient. Well, we were wrong. As soon as it became clear that our temporary mitigation efforts were failing to keep up with the rate at which disk space was being consumed (mostly by the aforementioned logs), we immediately implemented the maintenance that we had planned and already practised on a test server. This practice paid off, as instead of allowing an hour for the maintenance to complete, we were done in four minutes, including a server reboot.

That said, the lack of disk space on the server did cause disruption in the rate at which mail was processed, that led to some of you getting errors when sending email, and some incoming email being delayed. For this we apologise. The backed-up mail queue was fully processed by 09:18 UTC.

Had our prediction held up and the maintenance been carried out this evening as scheduled, we wouldn’t even have needed to post this detail. However, in order to clear up any concern, we have.

Early in 2022 server NC036 is due to be considered for replacement. The experience of this issue and other issues we have run into in recent months will inform our decisions about where to locate the replacement server (hint: it won’t be in the current data centre) and various configuration improvements we can make. We’ll also, of course, be using a more current version of the control panel.

If you have any questions at all about today’s maintenance, please let us know by contacting NinerNet support. Thank-you for your patience, and continued patronage.

NC036: Maintenance complete

16 October 2021 09:05:46 +0000

The maintenance on server NC036 (the primary mail server) is complete and the server is back online. It was unavailable between 08:28 and 08:32 UTC. According to some reports there have been issues with delayed emails and “lookup failure” errors, but these have now cleared.

We’ll be posting some further information shortly with more details.

NC036: Weekend maintenance moved up, starting in the next few minutes

16 October 2021 08:23:31 +0000

The situation on server NC036 needs to be addressed immediately. We will be doing this maintenance in the next few minutes. We will post updates here.

NinerNet home page

Systems at a Glance:


Loc.SystemStatusPing
Server NC023, London, United Kingdom (Relay server), INTERNAL.NC023InternalUp?
Server NC028, Vancouver, Canada (Monitoring server), INTERNAL.NC028InternalUp?
Server NC031, New York, United States of America (Web server), INTERNAL.NC031InternalUp?
Server NC033, Toronto, Canada (Primary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC033OperationalUp?
Server NC034, Lusaka, Zambia (Phone server), INTERNAL.NC034InternalUp?
Server NC035, Sydney, Australia (Secondary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC035OperationalUp?
Server NC036, Amsterdam, Netherlands (Mail server), OPERATIONAL.NC036OperationalUp?
Server NC040, Toronto, Canada (Web server), INTERNAL.NC040InternalUp?
Server NC041, New York, United States of America (Web server), OPERATIONAL.NC041OperationalUp?
Server NC042, Seattle, United States of America (Status website), OPERATIONAL.NC042OperationalUp?

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