Server and System Status

NC041: Virtualmin Word-press updates

6 June 2026 23:32:09 +0000

You may have received an automated email from our web server informing you that updates are ready to be installed for Word-press. Normally we take care of these updates well within 24 hours (before another reminder goes out); however, this time, some clients are required to upgrade their version of PHP in order to install the Word-press update to version 7. The control panel does not give us the option of mass-upgrading PHP versions, so if you are using an older version of PHP then you have to log into the control panel to update your PHP version to 7.4 or higher, after which you can update Word-press.

In order to upgrade PHP for your server, please follow these instructions:

Log into your control panel at https://web.niner.net:10000/
If you have more than one website, select a domain from the drop-down list.
When the page reloads, select Web Configuration -> PHP Options.
On the right, in the main part of the page, select the latest (highest number) version of PHP to the right of “Default HTML directory”.
Click the yellow (formerly green) Save button near the bottom of the page.
The server will go through the process of making changes to the server for a few seconds.

Now you’re ready to update Word-press. Please go ahead and do so.

Tags: control panel, php, web server, wordpress
Categories: Maintenance, NC041
Comments Off

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

15 January 2026 10:24:37 +0000

The *.niner.net wildcard SSL/TLS certificate has been renewed and updated across our entire infrastructure. This should be seamless for all our clients. However, should you run into a situation in the next 24 hours where you’re told that the certificate has expired, please log out and reload whatever it is you’re trying to do. You may need to reboot, but this would be very unusual. Simply forcing a reload should clear things up. Via FTPS you may need to re-trust our certificate depending on your FTP client.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers. There is also an ongoing issue on dns.niner.net, but bypassing the SSL warning is perfectly safe.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.

Tags: ssl, ssl certificate, tls, tls certificate
Categories: Maintenance, NC031, NC033, NC035, NC036, NC040, NC041, Upgrades
Comments Off

NC033 & NC035: Progress report 1

14 November 2025 08:12:07 +0000

This is one of those operations that takes only a few minutes if you’ve done it a thousand times before. 🙂 But we’ve sort of addressed the imminent possible problem of our secondary mail relay service changing one of their requirements. To be frank, although this maintenance needed (and still needs) to be done, we’ve instead done a lot of manual work that has addressed the immediate problem before the weekend.

But we do need to spin up two new nameservers; it’s been at the top of our list for some time, and will greatly improve how you will be able to manage the nameservice for your domains. Since we last did this a few years ago we’ve found that we have greater choice of software and methods than we had before, and so we’re going to take some time over the weekend to evaluate a number of different options. Finishing the maintenance over the weekend will also ensure that we avoid stepping on anybody’s toes in the middle of their changing their DNS.

We will finish over the weekend and continue to post further updates here. Thank-you for your patience.

Tags: control panel, dns, mail relay, nameservers
Categories: Administration, Maintenance, NC033, NC035, Upgrades
Comments Off

NC033 & NC035: Nameservers undergoing replacement

13 November 2025 14:33:24 +0000

We need to replace our two nameservers (NC033 and NC035) in short order. Under normal circumstances this would be a seamless operation, of which we could just notify you after the fact. However, we always notify you of planned maintenance in advance anyway, but in this case we are under a tight deadline to do this due to changed requirements at our secondary mail relay service.

Our plan is to carry out this operation over the next few hours. It’s unclear whether SMTP2GO’s deadline is in the UTC time zone or in New Zealand where the company is located. If the deadline is in the UTC time zone then we’ll be finished long before the deadline. There will be no downtime, but if there is any interruption if will be for some outbound email. We will work to avoid this and implement workarounds if necessary.

There will be a new look with a new control panel next time you log into dns.niner.net. In one of our next few posts we will post screenshots of the new control panel so that you know what to expect.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support. We will post updates as necessary as work progresses. Thank-you.

Tags: control panel, dns, mail relay, nameservers
Categories: Administration, Maintenance, NC033, NC035, Upgrades
Comments Off

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

16 January 2025 03:20:54 +0000

However, we are aware of unusual behaviour in some email programs, but this does not include Outlook and Thunderbird. We are working to determine the cause of these known problems, and will update this post when we know more.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.

Update, 2025-01-16: We’re getting more and more reports of problems. Please reboot your computers/machines/devices. If you are reporting a problem, please advise us of the program you are using. And please also keep in mind that you can use the webmail.

Update 2, 2025-01-16: This problem has finally been resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience. We did test it with Outlook, but apparently some versions of Outlook, other than the one we tested with, had problems. This is an operation that usually take 10-15 minutes once a year and is completed without anyone noticing!

Tags: ssl, ssl certificate, tls, tls certificate
Categories: Maintenance, NC031, NC033, NC035, NC036, NC040, NC041, Upgrades
Comments Off

Upcoming nameserver infrastructure changes

28 December 2024 03:53:34 +0000

We are alerting our clients to some upcoming work on our nameserver infrastructure.

With immediate effect, right after this blog post, we will be changing the nameservers for our infrastructure domain, ninernet.net. This will, seamlessly, transfer the management of this domain, which underpins all of NinerNet‘s servers; each server has a DNS (domain name system) name based on the ninernet.net domain — e.g., the primary mail server is nc036.ninernet.net and the primary web server is nc041.ninernet.net. As stated, this transition should be seamless and will not be noticed by any of our clients. The new nameservers for this domain (ninernet.net) are already set up, and the only thing that is changing is where other servers on the Internet will look for authoritative information for the ninernet.net domain.

The second part of this plan is to set up new nameservers for all of our clients with a new and improved control panel. However, this phase will not take place until January. At that time we will advise clients what you need to know.

Please note that the ninernet.net domain is not the niner.net domain; the niner.net domain is, of course, our primary domain for all web and email purposes; on the other hand, the ninernet.net domain, which we registered in 2005, is purely an infrastructure domain. About the only time you will see it is when we refer to it like this and when you look at the extended headers of your email messages.

Thank-you in advance for your attention to this matter, although no action is needed on your part.

Update, 2024-12-28: Domains that use the ANAME record type may experience issues on their websites. We’ll be addressing these individually as they arise.

Tags: dns, nameservers, network
Categories: Maintenance, NC033, NC035
Comments Off

NC041: Maintenance concluded

24 November 2024 22:10:24 +0000

Our weekend maintenance is over and complete, save for the one WordPress website that won’t update. This particular website is an ongoing problem, but when the update is run from within WordPress the update works. So we’ll be asking that client to do that themselves.

The server was rebooted four times, with a total downtime of a little under six minutes over the course of about four hours … actually, quite a bit less, as I was reading an article with respect to replacing the operating system on all of our servers. Time flies when you’re reading!

Everything is running just fine on server NC041 now. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you for your patience and understanding.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC041, Upgrades
Comments Off

NC041: Server maintenance in progress today

24 November 2024 17:48:58 +0000

During our weekend maintenance window we are working on dealing with some WordPress upgrades on server NC041 that are not going as planned. The server may be rebooted a number of times. During this maintenance our third-party monitoring will be paused, as it usually is during scheduled maintenance.

Once we are done we will post an update here. We don’t expect to cause much in the way of interruptions, but we are letting you know in advance in case you notice. Thanks for your patience.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC041, Upgrades
Comments Off

NC041: Server reboot complete

19 November 2024 12:44:20 +0000

NC041 has been rebooted and is again online and serving websites. Our apologies for the brief interruption. It was down for about a minute.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC041
Comments Off

NC041: Emergency reboot

19 November 2024 12:36:23 +0000

In a few minutes we will be rebooting NC041, the primary web server. It should only be down for about a minute, and we’ll post here again as soon as it is up.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC041
Comments Off

System	Status	Ping
NC023	Internal	Up?
NC028	Internal	Up?
NC031	Internal	Up?
NC033	Operational	Up?
NC034	Internal	Up?
NC035	Operational	Up?
NC036	Shut down	Up?
NC040	Internal	Up?
NC041	Operational	Up?
NC042	Operational	Up?