Server and System Status

All servers: SSL certificates updated

23 October 2017 18:45:48 +0000

The *.niner.net SSL certificate was updated over the weekend on all servers, as the old one has just expired.

If you get any certificate errors in either your web browser or email program, please close down all programs, restart your computer, and try again. This should clear the cache of the programs in question and force them to download the new certificate information.

If you have any problems, please contact us.

London network restored

27 December 2015 10:17:45 +0000

The data centre informs us that connectivity on their network was restored at 09:24 UTC.

We have been able to confirm this by accessing all of our servers in this data centre:

Incoming mail is once again being processed immediately by server NC027, although any incoming mail sent during the disruption may be delayed a little longer until the sending mail servers try again. This is not under our control.
Server NC023 is also processing email immediately.

We apologise for this interruption. Denial of service attacks (especially distributed denial of service attacks) are extremely difficult and expensive to fight. We have confidence that the data centre did everything they could as quickly as they could to combat this attack.

Tags: connection issues, dos attack, email delivery, mail relay
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC023, NC027
Comments Off

London data centre DDoS update

27 December 2015 08:30:17 +0000

We have been updated that the denial of service attack against the London data centre is actually a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and it is still underway. Efforts are being made at multiple levels on the network to combat this attack, and we are seeing some movement of email through server NC027, although it took an hour and forty-seven minutes for a test message to get through. This indicates, as mentioned earlier, that the server is up and processing email, but that other servers (and our clients, obviously) are having problems connecting to the server.

We apologise for these problems, but this is affecting a wide range and large number of companies hosted at this data centre, not just NinerNet.

Updates will continue to be posted here as we learn more.

Tags: connection issues, dos attack, email delivery, mail relay
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC023, NC027
Comments Off

Connectivity issue at London data centre

27 December 2015 06:52:18 +0000

The London data centre has been suffering from the effects of a couple of denial of service (DoS) attacks over the last 12 or so hours. The attack late yesterday (26 December) lasted about an hour and a half. Today’s attack started at 05:37 UTC and is currently ongoing. The data centre staff assure us that they have identified the problem and are implementing a fix for it.

This affects server NC023 (the relay server) and server NC027 (the main mail server), as well as virtual private servers hosted in London. As far as we know, the servers themselves are up and connected to the network, but the attack is causing them to be inaccessible.

We’ll update here as soon as we know more.

Tags: connection issues, dos attack, email delivery, mail relay
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC023, NC027
Comments Off

NC023: Maintenance complete

1 November 2015 03:34:56 +0000

The upgrades to server NC023 completed at 03:22 UTC. We will run some tests to ensure that everything is fine.

If you have any issues with server NC023, please let us know. Thank-you.

Tags: down time, mail relay, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC023
Comments Off

NC023: Maintenance underway

1 November 2015 02:21:27 +0000

Server NC023 went down for maintenance at 02:20 UTC. The server may be up and down a few times over the next hour.

Tags: down time, mail relay, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC023
Comments Off

NC023: Server maintenance

1 November 2015 02:03:11 +0000

Server NC023 will be going down within the next hour for up to an hour for some operating system upgrades and disk management. We’ll post updates here as necessary, but we don’t expect that this will affect many clients.

Tags: down time, mail relay, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC023
Comments Off

NC023: Emergency maintenance complete

22 October 2015 21:20:45 +0000

The emergency maintenance on server NC023 started at precisely 20:00 UTC and was completed successfully by 20:23 UTC.

There is actually a third server that needs the same work as the two that have already been attended to. We will post our plan for that later today.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail relay, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC023
Comments Off

Upcoming emergency server maintenance

19 October 2015 13:04:30 +0000

We have scheduled emergency maintenance this week for two of our servers to address a yet-to-be-published security vulnerability in the underlying virtualisation software these servers use.

The schedule is as follows:

Server NC027: Wednesday 21 October 2015 at 02:00 UTC
Server NC023: Thursday 22 October 2015 at 20:00 UTC

Please click on the dates and times to convert the time of the maintenance into your local time zone. Server NC023 is commonly referred to by those that use it as the “relay server”, and server NC027 is our primary mail server.

The maintenance window will be approximately two hours long, but often ends up being much shorter. During the maintenance window the servers and everything hosted on them will be inaccessible. Any incoming mail for domains hosted on the mail server will be queued on the sending mail servers until our mail server is back online; email will be delayed during this time, but not lost. You will be unable to send email or access the webmail during the maintenance window. No websites will be affected.

While we are aware that this maintenance is scheduled during part of the work day for some of our clients, we are unable to change that due to the demands of this effort. We sincerely apologise for that.

We will post updates here and in alerts on our website before, during and after the maintenance.

We appreciate your patience with our efforts to keep our infrastructure and yours secure. If you have any questions, please let us know. Thank-you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail relay, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC023, NC027
1 Comment »

Xen security updates

8 March 2015 12:27:53 +0000

Some of our servers use a technology called Xen. Like all software, it is subject to the discovery of bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Over the last week, all of our servers that use Xen have undergone “patching” to address some newly-discovered — but not yet publicised — security vulnerabilities. This patching required servers to be rebooted, and finished this morning.

We thank you for your patience this week during these upgrades.

Tags: down time, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC020, NC023, NC026, NC027
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?