Server and System Status

NC033: Emergency server maintenance

26 February 2018 10:17:51 +0000

Per our previous blog post, the next of our servers to undergo updating is NC033, on which the vast majority of our clients’ (and our own) nameservers (DNS) are hosted. The maintenance window is one hour long, but we expect that the server will be down for much less than that.

The maintenance window starts at:

19:00 UTC on Tuesday 27 February 2018

Please click the link above to determine when this will be in your time zone.

The DNS (domain name system) has redundancy built into it, and we have multiple nameservers distributed in Canada, the US and the UK. This means that while this one server is down the others will take up the slack and this maintenance won’t affect the rest of your services in any way.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. Thank-you for your patience.

Tags: down time, hardware, nameservers, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC033
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Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities

17 January 2018 13:58:43 +0000

As you may have heard and read in the news since the beginning of January, major vulnerabilities in very widely used computer hardware (not software) were discovered in mid-2017 by security researchers in Austria, Germany, the United States and Australia, and were publicised on 3 January. Fixes to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities are now being released, and further mitigating measures are under active development where such mitigation is possible.

To this end we will be applying patches to our servers starting tomorrow (18 January) that will necessitate some down time. Due to the nature and scale of this problem — illustrated by the answer to the question, “Am I affected by the vulnerability?” being a simple, “Most certainly, yes” — these patches cannot be delayed or scheduled for a more convenient time. Also, as work continues on ways to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities, there are some updates to the operating systems on our servers that are yet to be developed that will need to be applied in the future. As further related maintenance takes place we will link back to this post.

Following this blog post we will post the details of the first server to undergo patching.

Further details on these vulnerabilities can be read at the following links:

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. Thank-you for your patience.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC020, NC023, NC027, NC031, NC033
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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.

Tags: ssl, ssl certificate, tls, tls certificate
Categories: Maintenance, NC020, NC023, NC027, NC031, NC033
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NC018: Move of nameserver complete

11 September 2017 16:26:25 +0000

The move of NinerNet‘s primary nameserver to a new machine (NC033) has been completed, and our testing over the weekend shows that the new DNS information has propagated to the rest of the Internet.

The new nameserver has its own control panel, but we have not set up all client accounts on it yet. When that task is complete we will be sending you an email with your log-in information, and instructions for using the new control panel. If you have a need to manage your domain’s DNS and have not received that email yet, please contact support and we will assist you.

Thank-you for your patience during our recent migrations.

Tags: dns, hardware, migration, nameservers
Categories: Maintenance, NC018, NC033
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NC018: Server to shut down

8 September 2017 01:19:46 +0000

We will be shutting down server NC018 within the next 24-72 hours. Normally the closure of a server would not be an event we’d dwell on, but server NC018 has been around for a long time and the migrations off of it have been dragged out for longer than they should have been.

We want to assure all hosting clients that the email that used to be hosted on this server has long since been moved to server NC027, and all websites that used to be hosted on NC018 have been moved to servers NC020 and NC031. No email or websites remain on server NC018.

What does remain on this server at the moment is the DNS (domain name system) service. A new server (NC033) has been commissioned and configured to take over this service, and the DNS information for all domains has been transferred to the new server.

All that said, completely removing NC018 from the NinerNet ecosystem at the flick of a switch will probably reveal one function or another still connected to and relying on a server that has been around for as long as it has. While this is possible, any such function will be of minor significance — it won’t be anything vital to the operation of your email or website — and we’re doing this at the start of a weekend so that we can quickly address any issues that may arise outside of your business hours. We will, of course, post any necessary updates here on our status page (status.niner.net), to which you can subscribe.

One long-standing item that we will address after NC018 has been removed is the matter of control panels. The reason we have multiple control panels will be the subject of a future blog post, but there is a reason we don’t have one grand, unifying control panel … besides the fact that we’ve been there and done that and don’t want to do it again. We have three main servers (with control panels) providing our three main hosting services:

NC027: Mail server (email hosting)
NC031: Web server (website hosting)
NC033: Name server (DNS hosting)

Once server NC018 has been shut down we’ll redirect cp.niner.net to a page that explains the above. (You’re reading it now.) In the future we’ll implement a more elegant way of unifying (to a certain extent) the way you access the three control panels.

We thank you for your patience as we work very hard to improve our infrastructure to serve you better. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Craig

Tags: migration, nameservers
Categories: Maintenance, NC018, NC020, NC027, NC031, NC033
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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?