NinerNet Communications™
System Status

Server and System Status

NC027: Maintenance update

15 March 2014 19:33:23 +0000

The server was taken down for maintenance at 19:23 UTC. The maintenance is underway at this time.

We will post an update here as soon as the server is back online.

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Categories: Maintenance, NC027
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NC027: System maintenance

13 March 2014 10:38:17 +0000

We will be upgrading server NC027 over the weekend to increase its capacity. This maintenance will take about 40 minutes, during which the server will be completely inaccessible. However, incoming mail will be spooled on sending systems, and will be delivered when the server comes back up. No email will be lost or bounced.

Here are the details:

  • Start of maintenance window: 19:00 15 March 2014 UTC
  • Length of maintenance window: 1 hour

While the length of the maintenance window is an hour, the actual length of the maintenance should only be about 40 minutes sometime during that hour. If either the maintenance window or the length of the maintenance should change, we will post updates here.

To convert the above time and date to your time zone, please visit the World Time Server website.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you for your patience while we work to improve the service that we offer to you.

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Categories: Maintenance, NC027
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NC027: Investigation findings

26 January 2014 16:00:09 +0000

Server NC027 (the new mail-only server) experienced a great and very brief increase in activity at about 04:00 UTC on 23 January, and we suspect that this lead to the server getting behind in scanning and processing email. The hard drives simply couldn’t keep up.

In order to allow the server to catch up, we disabled virus and spam scanning. Over the course of the coming week we’ll be re-enabling each of these (inbound and outbound) one at a time per day. This will allow us to determine which activity is the bottleneck and make finer adjustments accordingly. We also have a back-up plan to move the accounts on this server to one with faster (solid-state) drives, if necessary.

We apologise again for the inconvenience of significantly delayed email on Thursday. If you have any questions about this incident, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

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Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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NC023: Spam cleaned up

26 January 2014 15:45:01 +0000

The spam on server NC023 (the relay server) has been cleaned up and the offending IP address blocked. Most of the legitimate email to destination servers that had been deferred as a result of the spam has also now been delivered; however, some mail servers are still not accepting email from this server, so that email will continue to be delayed a while longer until their systems are automatically updated to realise that this server is no longer spamming. This is currently only affecting about twenty messages.

We apologise for this interruption. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you for your patience.

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Categories: Email, Incidents, NC023
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NC023: Relay server stopped to clean up spam

26 January 2014 13:28:29 +0000

The relay server has been stopped while we clean up a spam outbreak, and identify and block the source. We will post updates here. We expect to have the server back online within the next 30-40 minutes.

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Categories: Email, Incidents, NC023
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NC027: Mail queue almost clear

23 January 2014 14:48:04 +0000

The mail queue will be cleared within the next 20-30 minutes.

Once the queue is clear we’ll be looking for a cause for this incident. There was a great spike in activity on this server around 04:00 UTC, and it’s quite possible that the initial back-up started around that time and didn’t quite manage to catch up.

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NC027: New mail delivered immediately

23 January 2014 13:25:21 +0000

Since reconfiguring the mail server we’ve noticed that new email is being delivered right away. It is now only the backlog that is still slowly being processed.

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NC027: Performance improvement

23 January 2014 11:55:41 +0000

We have made some adjustments to the configuration of the mail server on NC027 and as a result the mail queue seems to be clearing, albeit very slowly. We’re continuing to work on this to speed up delivery.

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Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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Server NC027 performance degraded

23 January 2014 09:07:10 +0000

Server NC027 has a large and growing mail queue, but the server is up. We are investigating and will post updates here.

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Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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Email migration: Update 14

29 October 2013 08:57:36 +0000

This is the last post that we’ll refer to as an “update” regarding the email migration that was largely completed three weeks ago … if only so that we don’t end on number 13. It addresses three issues:

  • Outlook 2003,
  • Anti-spam blacklists, and
  • Mail box quotas.

Outlook 2003: During the migration we learnt that Outlook 2003 does not support TLS. This is software that is over a decade old, and Microsoft will stop supporting it in less than six months. Now would be a good time to upgrade. However, apparently a 2004 “hotfix” available from Microsoft will add TLS support to Outlook 2003, but we cannot vouch for this personally, nor are we aware of any clients who have used this.

The anti-spam blacklists used on the old server were not immediately implemented on the new server. They have been now. The amount of spam you receive should drop significantly as a result.

Finally, we have increased mail box quotas across the board, as we try to keep up with the growing number of people using smart phones and tablets who store significant amounts of mail on the server.

As always, if you have any questions, please contact support and we’ll be happy to assist.

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Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC027
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Systems at a Glance:


Loc.SystemStatusPing
Server NC023, London, United Kingdom (Relay server), INTERNAL.NC023InternalUp?
Server NC028, Vancouver, Canada (Monitoring server), INTERNAL.NC028InternalUp?
Server NC031, New York, United States of America (Web server), INTERNAL.NC031InternalUp?
Server NC033, Toronto, Canada (Primary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC033OperationalUp?
Server NC034, Lusaka, Zambia (Phone server), INTERNAL.NC034InternalUp?
Server NC035, Sydney, Australia (Secondary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC035OperationalUp?
Server NC036, Amsterdam, Netherlands (Mail server), OPERATIONAL.NC036OperationalUp?
Server NC040, Toronto, Canada (Web server), INTERNAL.NC040InternalUp?
Server NC041, New York, United States of America (Web server), OPERATIONAL.NC041OperationalUp?
Server NC042, Seattle, United States of America (Status website), OPERATIONAL.NC042OperationalUp?

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