Server and System Status

NC027: Addition of disk space

25 April 2018 11:53:31 +0000

Due to the growing need for more and bigger email accounts, we need to add more disk space to server NC027. This will require us to take the mail server offline during our regular weekly maintenance window for approximately four hours starting at 20:00 UTC on Saturday 28 April 2018. (Please click that link to determine when this will be in your time zone.)

During this maintenance you will not be able to send or receive email. Incoming email to your domain will be held on the sending servers until our mail server is back online, and will then be delivered to your accounts. No email will be lost.

Please note that email to NinerNet will also be down during the maintenance on server NC027.

This is phase one in a two-phase plan to ensure that long, disruptive maintenance windows like this become a thing of the past. We will post more details about this in the coming days.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, migration, reboot, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC027
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NC023, NC027 and NC031: Spectre maintenance

25 April 2018 11:41:21 +0000

Per our previous blog post, three of our servers will be updated to address variants 1 and 2 of the Spectre vulnerability per the following schedule (start times) in chronological order:

NC027: 23:00 UTC on Tuesday 1 May 2018 (DONE)
NC031: 05:00 UTC on Wednesday 2 May 2018
NC023: 20:00 UTC on Wednesday 2 May 2018

As with the previous upgrades for the Meltdown vulnerability, the maintenance windows for each are two hours long, but we expect that each server will be down for much less than that. During the Meltdown maintenance the servers were down for between 13 and 19 minutes, and we expect much the same this time around.

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

During the maintenance of servers NC023 and NC027 you will not be able to send or receive email. Incoming email to your domain will be held on the sending servers until our mail server is back online, and will then be delivered to your accounts. No email will be lost. Please note that email to NinerNet will also be down during the maintenance on server NC027.

During the maintenance of server NC031 your website will be inaccessible, both to you and the public.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, mail relay, reboot, smtp, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC023, NC027, NC031
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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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NC023 and NC027: Maintenance complete

19 January 2018 03:30:26 +0000

Server NC023 was down for maintenance between 03:00 and 03:18 and server NC027 was down for maintenance between 03:02 and 03:15, and both have 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, email delivery, hardware, mail relay, reboot, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC023, NC027
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NC031: Maintenance complete

18 January 2018 08:33:02 +0000

Server NC031 was down for maintenance between 07:00 and 07:19, 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, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC031
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NC023 and NC027: Emergency server maintenance

18 January 2018 02:54:25 +0000

Per our previous blog post, the next of our servers to undergo updating are NC023 (the relay server) and NC027 (the primary mail server). The maintenance windows for each are two hours’ long, but we expect that each server will be down for much less than that.

The maintenance window for both starts at:

03:00 UTC on Friday 19 January 2018

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

During the maintenance you will not be able to send or receive email. Incoming email to your domain will be held on the sending servers until our mail server is back online, and will then be delivered to your accounts. No email will be lost.

Please note that email to NinerNet will also be down during the maintenance on server NC027.

Tags: down time, email delivery, hardware, mail relay, reboot, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC023, NC027
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NC031: Emergency server maintenance

17 January 2018 14:03:35 +0000

Per our previous blog post, the first of our servers to undergo updating is NC031, on which most clients’ website are hosted. The maintenance window is two hours’ long, but we expect that the server will be down for much less than that.

The maintenance window starts at:

07:00 UTC on Thursday 18 January 2018

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

Please note that the NinerNet website will also be down during the maintenance on server NC031.

Tags: down time, hardware, reboot, web server
Categories: Maintenance, NC031
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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
2 Comments »

NC020: Server networking issues

17 December 2017 12:27:45 +0000

Due to a misconfiguration of server NC020 by data centre personnel in response to a networking request from NinerNet that resulted from a change in one of their policies, this server stopped processing email properly earlier today. This resulted in some instability and the rebooting of the server three times between 07:22 and 08:06 UTC.

These problems affected only email processed for NinerNet domains, not any client email. However, because there are still a few client websites hosted on this server, including this status blog, these sites would have been down and up for some time this morning.

We have corrected the networking issue and have remonstrated with the data centre over the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and will endeavour to ensure that this does not happen again.

Tags: connection issues, down time, email delivery, performance, reboot, web server
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC020
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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?