Server and System Status

NC036: Scheduled mail server maintenance

14 December 2018 07:03:01 +0000

During this weekend’s maintenance window we will be adding hard drive storage to server NC036 to continue to provide more storage space for a growing number of growing email accounts. This maintenance is scheduled to start at 19:00 UTC and we anticipate it will last less than one hour.

During the maintenance the ability to send and receive email will not be available, both via standalone email programs (e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) and the webmail. Incoming email will be queued on the sending servers until our server is back online again, after which it will then be delivered to our server and your email account. This may result in a delay longer than the planned hour of the maintenance though.

Please monitor this status page to be notified of the start and end of the maintenance. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support.

Thank-you for your patience as we continue to work to improve our services to you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
1 Comment »

NC033: Maintenance complete

11 June 2018 00:45:06 +0000

Server NC033 is back online. It was down between 00:37 and 00:43 UTC.

Tags: dns, down time, nameservers, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC033
Comments Off

NC033: Maintenance

11 June 2018 00:35:57 +0000

Server NC033 (the primary nameserver) is going down for maintenance in a few minutes for maintenance related to solving the mail server migration issue.

Tags: dns, down time, nameservers, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC033
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 14 — Microsoft blocks

6 June 2018 15:43:33 +0000

It seems that Microsoft blocks every IP address on the Internet by default, except those for which mail server administrators like NinerNet have to beg repeatedly to have removed. Our requests keep being ignored, despite the fact that we are members of both their Smart Network Data Service (SNDS) and their Junk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), but we will keep trying.

Currently this means that we route Microsoft’s main domains — hotmail.com, outlook.com, msn.com and live.com — through our relay server which is not blacklisted as it pre-dates their aggressive blocking practices. However, if you send email to a non-Microsoft domain hosted by Outlook/Office365, you will almost certainly receive a bounce message that looks like this (if the domain you sent to hosted by Microsoft is “exampledomain.com”):

Remote-MTA: dns; exampledomain-com.mail.protection.outlook.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.7.606 Access denied, banned sending IP
    [178.62.195.26]. To request removal from this list please visit
    https://sender.office.com/ and follow the directions. For more information
    please go to  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=526655 (AS16012609)

Tags: email delivery, spam
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 13

6 June 2018 12:52:23 +0000

We will post a postmortem here in due course, hopefully with 24-48 hours, along with a thousand more apologies, but we are looking for feedback to ensure that all clients are able to connect to the server and download and send email, as this was not the case on Monday and Tuesday.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 12 — server back online

6 June 2018 12:28:04 +0000

The transfer of the mail spools has completed and server NC036 was brought back online at 12:12 UTC.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 12

6 June 2018 08:32:10 +0000

The transfer of mail data between the old and new data centres is still underway. Considering the transfer of the same amount of data took 50 minutes over the weekend, and we are now at the 5-hour mark, it was impossible for us to predict that this would take so long.

I can assure you that I understand the frustration that you are feeling with this situation, but given the network problems in southern and central Africa that necessitated this emergency move, we had no choice but to act immediately rather than forcing many clients to do without mail until the weekend.

My best estimate at this point, based on how much data has transferred so far (55%) and how much is left, is that the transfer will complete at approximately 13:00 UTC. Assuming this is the case, the server will be back online and accessible at about 13:30 UTC.

I sincerely and deeply apologise for this situation.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 11

6 June 2018 04:42:04 +0000

The transfer is taking significantly longer than we anticipated, likely due to the greater distance between the two data centres.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 10

6 June 2018 03:36:47 +0000

We’re almost done. Just waiting for the mail spools to finish transferring, then a few checks (double-checks) to ensure that all is in order, and we’ll re-enable all services. Then more checks to ensure that mail is flowing as it should, and then we await feedback.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

NC036: Migration update 9

6 June 2018 01:22:20 +0000

We’ve finished planning this emergency migration of the new mail server (NC036), and will be shutting it down within the next five minutes.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, Maintenance, NC036
Comments Off

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