Server and System Status

The issue on our primary mail server has finally been resolved, and all messages in the queue have been delivered. As expected, once we had access it only took a few seconds.

We will post a post-mortem in the next couple of days … hopefully. I can’t exaggerate the extent to which numerous unrelated events have piled on top of one another — even in the last few minutes! — to prevent an earlier resolution of this problem, and at this point I can’t predict whether or not more issues will prevent the posting of the post-mortem. However, I’m finally taking a breath, as this issue (amongst other things) is finally resolved.

I do once again extend my heartfelt apology for this incident, and I will do everything in my power to review the cascading failures — all not even related to the mail server itself! — that led to this not being resolved much, much sooner.

Words cannot express my frustration at this point. 🙁

It will be another few hours again before this situation can be resolved. It just cannot go beyond tonight, UTC. By that time my computer will be completely reset with a fully updated operating system installed.

Sorry.

Let me explain the situation we’re in. It’s an illustration of the fact that sometimes too much is, in fact, too much.

My primary workstation stopped working late Wednesday afternoon (UTC). It stopped working because I could not log in after performing a maintenance/security operation that I routinely run, but I ran it in a certain way that was sightly different to how I usually run it with no problems.

At about the same time I received a report from a client about a problem with the mail server. I received it by email (of course) which I read on my phone. I hadn’t seen anything similar before, so I asked him for screenshots. In the meantime I had an idea of what the cause of the problem could be based on monitoring I had done the day before, but without access to my workstation I could not log in and check and fix the problem … which would (and will) take all of about 60 seconds if I am correct. Reports and my experience since have almost confirmed my suspicions.

So, given the fact that it is the middle of the night where I am I cannot do anything until business hours, which will be about 06:00 local, 13:00 UTC.

My local workstation is, of course, fully backed up, so it’s not a problem of a loss of data. The “problem” is with the additional security on logging into the server which we have purposely put into place in order to protect our infrastructure and your email. Because of that I cannot log into the mail server from the machine I am currently using, and will only have access to the resources I require in the morning, local time.

I cannot apologise enough for this situation that we have caused. We will calculate a credit that will be applied to all invoices of clients who host their email with us.

In the meantime, we apologise but this issue will continue until about 13:00 UTC. At that time I should have access to the server to fully and permanently address the problem. I will post an update here, on the status blog, when this issue is resolved. My humble and sincere apologies once again.