Server and System Status

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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NC036: Migration update 8 — Plan B

5 June 2018 23:32:15 +0000

Over the weekend we successfully migrated all of the email accounts on old server NC027 to new server NC036. Except that for a large swathe of our clients, this migration was NOT a success.

We can tell you unequivocally that the new server is running and running well. It’s doing a much better job than the old server, and we splurged on a high-performance server with additional software to process mail quicker and to do a better job of filtering out spam and viruses. That part is all going great, and I can tell you that I am delighted about that part.

The part that’s not going great is that the data centre in which we placed the new server appears to have some serious networking issues for a large number of clients in southern and central Africa. We could spend the next week troubleshooting this and perhaps find the cause (and then work on addressing the cause), but you and we don’t have the luxury of that much time. Within the next few hours we will send troubleshooting instructions to affected clients, just in case.

What we are going to do to resolve this issue is use the wonders of modern technology to shut down the new server, take an image of it to preserve the time, effort and expense that has gone into creating it, and transfer it to new hardware in a different data centre. Ideally I would like to take a day to set up a test server in that data centre but, again, you can’t afford to have no or limited access to your email for a day.

Fortunately the process of moving to another data centre is quite straightforward, and will not require as much downtime as the full migration did. Copying the image from one data centre to another will be much like physically carrying the server to the new data centre; it’s already set up and configured, it just needs to be plugged in at the other end. The only thing that will not be quicker is that we have to use more traditional methods to transfer your mail spools to the new server. This took 50 minutes on the weekend, but with two equally powerful servers on both ends of the transfer it should be a bit quicker this time.

We will shut down the server at 01:00 UTC on Wednesday 6 June. Including the data transfer and some minor reconfiguration, I sincerely hope to have it back online by 03:00 UTC.

Please keep an eye on this status blog, where we will post important updates during the process.

Thank-you for your extraordinary patience.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
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NC036: Migration update 7

4 June 2018 08:56:05 +0000

My apologies for not getting an update out sooner, but there have been some inevitable issues.

mail27.niner.net: First, if you have somehow been using the mail27.niner.net sub-domain in your email configuration, this was not a sub-domain intended to be used that way, and so was not pointed to the new server. However, we have reconsidered, and it is now pointing to the new server to assist those who apparently have it configured in their email.
Control panels: We are moving away from the unhelpful “cp” (control panel) sub-domains. The new mail control panel is located at mail.niner.net.
Webmail: This is now located at webmail.niner.net. We’ll be updating your domains with a “webmail” sub-domain to redirect to this in due course.
Control panel user names: If you used to log into the control panel with a user name that was your client code @mail27.niner.net, these no longer exist. We’ll be sending new log-in information within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you need to do anything in the control panel, please advise and we will assist.
Microsoft domains (Hotmail, Outlook, etc.): Despite the fact that we advised Microsoft through the proper channels that our new IP address is in their blacklist and their informing us that it would be removed, they are still blocking us. We are routing emails to their primary domains through our relay server to avoid emails being bounced, but it’s still possible that emails to these domains my end up in your correspondents’ spam folders.
Delays/losses: While the mail servers were down for approximately 7.5 hours — a lot longer than the four hours we optimistically forecast — incoming email to you sent while they were down will have been held on the sending server. Some of that backlog may take several hours to clear, depending on the policies of the senders’ mail servers, but the servers were down during an off-peak period anyway. Additionally, while we strive never to lose a single email during maintenance and migrations, we have seen several of our own emails to clients bounce. We will investigate and fix this issue.
Spam/viruses: On a more positive note, we’re already seeing this new server doing a much improved job of stopping spam and viruses.

Finally, one last apology for promising this migration three weeks ago and not actually delivering until now, and for not having all of the issues ironed out well in advance of Monday morning.

We’ll likely have additional information to post here later, but in the meantime you are welcome to contact us if you are having any issues not covered by the above.

Tags: control panel, down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp, spam, viruses, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC027, NC036
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NC027: Migration update 6

4 June 2018 04:25:43 +0000

Mail started flowing again at about 04:00 UTC. We will have some further details as time permits in the next couple of hours.

One apology: I’ve been using the wrong server number in the titles of the last few posts.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC027, NC036
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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?