We are installing some new servers this coming Sunday 27th.
Whilst this should not affect services we also need to perform some maintenance on some of the existing machines. There will be short outage of each of the machines but these should not take more than a few minutes each. These outages will be sequenced in such a way that incoming email always has a machine to accept, only fetching email will be affected when we cycle that particular machine.
We suffered what appears to have been a volume spam attack between 04:50GMT and 11:00 GMT this morning. This caused intermittent access to various services during this period.
We have adjusted some of the thresholds at which our various counter-measures trigger and reinitialised some trend databases which has restored normal service and should maintain it whilst we examine log files and system metrics to determine how best to ensure there is no repeat.
Please accept our apologies if you experienced this intermittent service.
We will be taking downtime on most machines on Saturday 2011-07-30 starting at 14:00 BST (13:00 UTC)
We will be working through the various machine upgrades sequentially, but ensuring that where possible there is always backup services at least for inbound email.
Depending on how these upgrades go we may delay some upgrades until Sunday afternoon.
We will be taking several hours downtime on each of our main hosting machines next weekend to perform major OS upgrades.
We will be able to give details of exactly when later this week after we coordinate with our hosters regarding access.
The plan is for each machine to be out for no more than a couple of hours. And we will sequence the updates in such a way that incoming email is always deliverable, even if final delivery for reading it is delayed.
These upgrades are the concluding steps in our ongoing upgrade of our various machines with the aim of providing a stable platform for our mail and blog services for at least the next five years.
Due to the release of security related package updates we’ve decided to accelerate our updating of the master machines that host the virtual machines that run our services.
We are currently updating the machine that hosts the secondary access. The backup receiving machines and the primaries for the Beta service. We hope to have the machine back up and running, along with all its virtual machines within a couple of hours.
On completion we will evaluate whether the remaining time available allows for the immediate upgrading of the primary services. We will post again once we have completed the first stage.
We’re having a disk problem on the main system, resulting in an
apparent heavy load. This results in 400-class errors reported
(451, etc) meaning “temporary error; please try again”.
As a temporary measure, reconfiguring your mail client to send
outbound via relay2.tidymail.co.uk will help. Unfortunately we
can’t do the same for accessing inbound mail.
More details when we have them.
We’re going for a reboot – but the disk is being recalcitrant.
We seem to be back. Inbound mail has stacked up in the queue on our secondary server; it will be passed to the primary shortly.
Our scheduled reboot of machines has been completed without incident.
All dependent services are running correctly.
Please contact us at helpdesk@tidymail.co.uk should you notice any problems.
We will be taking about an hour’s downtime on each of our major machines this coming Sunday 3rd April 2010 to allow us to install security updates.
During this time various portions of the service may be unavailable i.e. fetching/reading email, sending email. But due to the fact that we are doing these updates in sequence there will always be at least one machine which will accept incoming email so there will be no issue receiving.
We will start the outages from around 14:00 BST (13:00 GMT) though exact timings as things progress will be determined by how long it takes to verify each step.
We will be taking the machine hosting the main wizmail.org email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).
This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.
We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.
During this time it will not be possible to send or receive email, though any inbound email will be queued on the alternate inbound server during the outage and will be delivered to your inboxes as soon as the main server is back.
We will be taking the machine hosting the post.wizards.co.uk outbound email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).
This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.
We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.
During the outage it will not be possible to send email if you are configured to use post.wizards.co.uk as your outbound SMTP server. As an alternative you could configure your outbound to use post.tidymail.co.uk, but you must also have a client that can authenticate when it sends. Details of configuring common clients along with technical details for other clients can be found on our Configuring Your Client For Tidymail page.
