Server and System Status

NC033 & NC035: Progress report 1

14 November 2025 08:12:07 +0000

This is one of those operations that takes only a few minutes if you’ve done it a thousand times before. 🙂 But we’ve sort of addressed the imminent possible problem of our secondary mail relay service changing one of their requirements. To be frank, although this maintenance needed (and still needs) to be done, we’ve instead done a lot of manual work that has addressed the immediate problem before the weekend.

But we do need to spin up two new nameservers; it’s been at the top of our list for some time, and will greatly improve how you will be able to manage the nameservice for your domains. Since we last did this a few years ago we’ve found that we have greater choice of software and methods than we had before, and so we’re going to take some time over the weekend to evaluate a number of different options. Finishing the maintenance over the weekend will also ensure that we avoid stepping on anybody’s toes in the middle of their changing their DNS.

We will finish over the weekend and continue to post further updates here. Thank-you for your patience.

Tags: control panel, dns, mail relay, nameservers
Categories: Administration, Maintenance, NC033, NC035, Upgrades
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NC033 & NC035: Nameservers undergoing replacement

13 November 2025 14:33:24 +0000

We need to replace our two nameservers (NC033 and NC035) in short order. Under normal circumstances this would be a seamless operation, of which we could just notify you after the fact. However, we always notify you of planned maintenance in advance anyway, but in this case we are under a tight deadline to do this due to changed requirements at our secondary mail relay service.

Our plan is to carry out this operation over the next few hours. It’s unclear whether SMTP2GO’s deadline is in the UTC time zone or in New Zealand where the company is located. If the deadline is in the UTC time zone then we’ll be finished long before the deadline. There will be no downtime, but if there is any interruption if will be for some outbound email. We will work to avoid this and implement workarounds if necessary.

There will be a new look with a new control panel next time you log into dns.niner.net. In one of our next few posts we will post screenshots of the new control panel so that you know what to expect.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support. We will post updates as necessary as work progresses. Thank-you.

Tags: control panel, dns, mail relay, nameservers
Categories: Administration, Maintenance, NC033, NC035, Upgrades
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Upcoming nameserver infrastructure changes

28 December 2024 03:53:34 +0000

We are alerting our clients to some upcoming work on our nameserver infrastructure.

With immediate effect, right after this blog post, we will be changing the nameservers for our infrastructure domain, ninernet.net. This will, seamlessly, transfer the management of this domain, which underpins all of NinerNet‘s servers; each server has a DNS (domain name system) name based on the ninernet.net domain — e.g., the primary mail server is nc036.ninernet.net and the primary web server is nc041.ninernet.net. As stated, this transition should be seamless and will not be noticed by any of our clients. The new nameservers for this domain (ninernet.net) are already set up, and the only thing that is changing is where other servers on the Internet will look for authoritative information for the ninernet.net domain.

The second part of this plan is to set up new nameservers for all of our clients with a new and improved control panel. However, this phase will not take place until January. At that time we will advise clients what you need to know.

Please note that the ninernet.net domain is not the niner.net domain; the niner.net domain is, of course, our primary domain for all web and email purposes; on the other hand, the ninernet.net domain, which we registered in 2005, is purely an infrastructure domain. About the only time you will see it is when we refer to it like this and when you look at the extended headers of your email messages.

Thank-you in advance for your attention to this matter, although no action is needed on your part.

Update, 2024-12-28: Domains that use the ANAME record type may experience issues on their websites. We’ll be addressing these individually as they arise.

Tags: dns, nameservers, network
Categories: Maintenance, NC033, NC035
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NC033: Data centre maintenance

22 March 2022 09:31:57 +0000

The data centre at which server NC033 (our primary nameserver, ns1.niner.net) is housed will be undergoing some maintenance tomorrow, 23 March, between 05:00 and 08:00 UTC. The work is on the data centre’s network infrastructure, and not on this server itself. The data centre released this statement:

These upgrades are designed and tested to be seamless and we do not expect any impact to customer traffic due to this maintenance. Should an unexpected issue arise, a possible outcome would be temporary loss of connectivity …. We will endeavour to keep any such impact to a minimum.

The data centre managers have had a good reputation for reliability in the six years we have been using them, so we do not anticipate any issues. However, if there are, we expect they will be very brief.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

Tags: dns, nameservers, network
Categories: Maintenance, NC033
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NC033: Incident with primary nameserver resolved

15 November 2019 03:10:35 +0000

Following an operating system update that was applied at 00:37 UTC on 15 November the primary nameserver failed to restart. This was noticed immediately upon completion of the update, and we started troubleshooting.

After extensive research on the likely cause and resolution of the problem we determined that the quickest way to get the nameserver back online was to roll back the update and restore from a back-up. There were some issues with this, however, that necessitated implementing a back-up plan for company email in order for us to gain access to our account at the data centre where the nameserver is hosted. Once this was accomplished the restore was initiated.

The nameserver was back online at 02:28 UTC.

During the time the server was down domain information would have been cached by DNS resolvers that already had a cached copy of the DNS information for your domain. However, it is possible that some incoming email may have been delayed or possibly bounced, or people trying to browse your website would not have been able to see it. For this we apologise.

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

Tags: connection issues, dns, down time, nameservers
Categories: Incidents, Maintenance, NC033
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Decommissioning of old nameserver

19 October 2019 01:41:05 +0000

We are in the process of decommissioning server NC020. Among other functions, this server is also the machine on which nameserver ns3.niner.net is hosted. Not many clients’ domains are using ns3.niner.net, and of those that are most are registered with and therefore under the control of NinerNet. For this reason we can implement this change without bothering most clients.

However, if you have chosen to register your domain with another domain registrar and we don’t have access to your domain registration, we need to ask you to remove ns3.niner.net from the list of nameservers that are authoritative for your domain. If that is the case we will contact you via email, and point you to this notice to confirm the legitimacy of our request.

This change will not have any effect on your domain and how it, its website and email work. In fact, leaving ns3.niner.net in the list of nameservers authoritative for your domain will cause a slight decrease in performance, which is why we are asking you to remove it.

If you have any questions about this please reply to the email you will receive, or contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

Tags: dns, nameservers
Categories: Domains, Maintenance, NC020
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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
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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
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NC033: Maintenance complete

28 February 2018 05:51:11 +0000

Server NC033 was down for maintenance between 19:08 and 19:15 on 27 February, and has been successfully updated with current patches. This phase of the maintenance protects against Meltdown; further maintenance for protection against Spectre will take place when patches for it have been developed.

Updates will be posted here.

Tags: down time, hardware, nameservers, reboot
Categories: Maintenance, NC033
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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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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?