Over the weekend we successfully migrated all of the email accounts on old server NC027 to new server NC036. Except that for a large swathe of our clients, this migration was NOT a success.
We can tell you unequivocally that the new server is running and running well. It’s doing a much better job than the old server, and we splurged on a high-performance server with additional software to process mail quicker and to do a better job of filtering out spam and viruses. That part is all going great, and I can tell you that I am delighted about that part.
The part that’s not going great is that the data centre in which we placed the new server appears to have some serious networking issues for a large number of clients in southern and central Africa. We could spend the next week troubleshooting this and perhaps find the cause (and then work on addressing the cause), but you and we don’t have the luxury of that much time. Within the next few hours we will send troubleshooting instructions to affected clients, just in case.
What we are going to do to resolve this issue is use the wonders of modern technology to shut down the new server, take an image of it to preserve the time, effort and expense that has gone into creating it, and transfer it to new hardware in a different data centre. Ideally I would like to take a day to set up a test server in that data centre but, again, you can’t afford to have no or limited access to your email for a day.
Fortunately the process of moving to another data centre is quite straightforward, and will not require as much downtime as the full migration did. Copying the image from one data centre to another will be much like physically carrying the server to the new data centre; it’s already set up and configured, it just needs to be plugged in at the other end. The only thing that will not be quicker is that we have to use more traditional methods to transfer your mail spools to the new server. This took 50 minutes on the weekend, but with two equally powerful servers on both ends of the transfer it should be a bit quicker this time.
We will shut down the server at 01:00 UTC on Wednesday 6 June. Including the data transfer and some minor reconfiguration, I sincerely hope to have it back online by 03:00 UTC.
Please keep an eye on this status blog, where we will post important updates during the process.
Thank-you for your extraordinary patience.
