July 2009 Archives

As this weekend is a Bank Holiday in Ireland our opening hours are slightly different

Sales:
Friday 31st July 2009 - open
Saturday, Sunday, Monday - closed
Tuesday 4th August - open

Accounts (Billing)
Friday 31st July - open
Saturday, Sunday, Monday - closed
Tuesday 4th August - open

Technical Support
Friday 31st July - open
Saturday 1st August - 12.30 - 1630 (email / live chat - no phone support)
Sunday 2nd August - 12.30 - 1630 (email / live chat - no phone support)
Monday 3rd August - 12.00 - 1600 (email / live chat - no phone support)
Tuesday 4th August - open normal hours (8am - 7pm)

Emergency Technical Support
If you have a dedicated server OR colocation you should have the emergency number for technical support which is available 24/7. If you have misplaced the number let us know

We are currently having issues processing credit card / Laser payments, as well as domain registrations for .ie / .im / .eu / .gg / .je

Our development team is working on the issue

Payments via Paypal should be working without issue

Update: 12:25

We've been successfully processing payments for around 15 minutes now. Also domain registrations should be working as before. This includes but is not limited to name server changes for ie/eu domains. All orders that were taken are being processed for payment now, our accounting team are working their way through. We should have the backlog cleared in the next 30 minutes.

Update: 12:30: RESOLVED

I've just been informed that all orders that were in the payment queue have been cleared. This issue is now resolved fully.

We are currently experiencing an outage on the windows vps hardware node PEMWINVZ05 causing RDP and HTTP outages on customer VPSs. I will keep this post updated with updates as the server issues get resolved.

UPDATE 10:33 - Physical server back online.
UPDATE 10:39 - Containers / Customer VPSs coming back online.
UPDATE 10:48 - All VPSs are back online.

Due to an issue we are seeing with how Plesk is operating on PEMVZWIN05 we are scheduling some maintenance on the server.

The window will be from 00:30 until 02:30. The estimated downtime of the VPSs is less than 15 minutes.

The VPSs that will be affected:

vps-179.cp.blacknight.com
vps-199.cp.blacknight.com   
vps-465.cp.blacknight.com
VPS-665.cp.blacknight.com
vps-672.cp.blacknight.com
vps-704.cp.blacknight.com
vps-718.cp.blacknight.com
vps-787.cp.blacknight.com
vps-791.cp.blacknight.com
vps-792.cp.blacknight.com
vps-795.cp.blacknight.com
vps-808.cp.blacknight.com
vps-809.cp.blacknight.com
vps-811.cp.blacknight.com
vps-814.cp.blacknight.com
vps-839.cp.blacknight.com
vps-841.cp.blacknight.com
vps-851.cp.blacknight.com
vps-853.cp.blacknight.com
vps-869.cp.blacknight.com


UPDATE: This ran successfully and the Plesk update was complete.

The following servers below will be rebooted on the 24th of July at 00:30 to facilitate in service upgrades to the servers.

Centralnic have informed us that they will be conducting maintenance on their core network on August 16th from 0800 UTC onwards.

This will  impact lookups, registrations and modifications.

Existing Centralnic domains will not be impacted.

TLDs impacted:
- .la
- uk.com
- gb.com
and several others

 

If since yesterdays (July 21st 09) upgrade your website is experiencing any problems with permissions or similar then the fix for you is simple.

Here's an overview of the changes:

php5 is now runs as an apache module.
php4 is only available as cgi.
php5 can be apache module or cgi.
 
Magento works best on php5 cgi if you previously had it on php5-cgi (ensure php4 is disabled)
Oscommerce works best on php5 apache module with register globals enabled in a .htaccess
wordpress is fairly robust and will work on either.
Joomla seems happy on php5-cgi (php4 disabled)
 
Almost all issues with webspaces can be resolved by changing to php5 as apache module and disabling php4. As php4 is EOL since December 2007 people should try not to use it at all.

Let us know if you have issues with your site, most problems are trivial to resolve and can be done by performing the above actions.

One of our shared windows servers - dinadan - 81.17.248.40 - is currently experiencing some difficulties serving client requests.

 

This effects both IIS and Coldfusion sites hosted on this server.

 

Our Engineers are aware of the issue, and hope to have a resolution very shortly.

 

Update 15:24

This issue should now be resolved.

 

Update 18:49

It would appear this issue is still effecting some coldfusion users on the server. We will endeavour to keep you updated with any progress.

Update 12:00 22/07

We've been monitoring this for the last while, and the issues seems to be resolved. If you are seeing further problems, let our support team know.

Summary: From 4am GMT tomorrow July 21st cp.blacknight.com will be down for short periods of time while we upgrade our cp software. This will continue until approx 09:00.

The following feature list will be available after this upgrade:

* PHP5 can now be run as an apache module or as php-cgi. This will allow better customisation of php variables via .htaccess. It also has some problems for customers running CMS applications however, so change this setting only if you know what you are doing.

* Perl on windows can now run as cgi or an isapi extension. Like php5 please only change if you know what you are doing.

* The ability to create temporary tables in MySQL should now be available to all users.

* php 4.4.9 and 5.2.9 will be supported on Linux shared hosting. php 5.2.9 will be supported on windows shared hosting.

* The linux file manager will be dropped in it's current form. A new integrated cp will be introduced which will reduce problems with ports, ssl mismatches etc. It will support unzipping and untaring .zip and .tar.gz files.

* DNS modification bugs have been fixed.

* several 100 bugs in various different sections of our CP have been fixed.

* php5 and 4 now have the mysql 5 client library compiled in so mysql access to mysql5 servers should work better than before. This will also elimiate the annoying notices that customers receive in phpmyadmin about library versions.

The above is only a summary of some of the major changes. There are going to be a lot of bug fixes as we've said along with other undocumented features.

Please let support know of any issues after 9am tomorrow.

update: 08:30 July 21st - important NOTEICE

The first phase of this upgrade has been completed. However seeing as it's a major version change there's already hotfix 1 available which fixes issues that occured post upgrade from 2.8 to 2.9 of our CP software.

I've authorised the install of hf01 to 2.9 this morning to ensure that the system is as stable as possible and that we don't encounter bugs today that are already fixed. The install of hf01 will take approx 2 hours so the cp will be up and down up until approx 11am.

UPDATE: 1214
The control panel is currently not accessible. We are awaiting an update from the software vendor

UPDATE 1250
The control panel should now be accessible and all other services should be working correctly. If there are any issues please let us know

UPDATE 1320
The control panel is currently experiencing some intermittent issues. The software vendors are dealing with this to get these issues resolved ASAP and we are awaiting an update.

UPDATE 1405
The control panel is available again, however there may be some lingering issues that the software vendors are still working on. Any further updates will be posted. If there are any issues you wish to make us aware of please let us know.

UPDATE 1433
If you are still having issues please email support@blacknight.com providing as much detail as possible so that we can reproduce the error

UPDATE 1501
There are intermittent issues with logging in to cp.blacknight.com - this matter is being looked into as a matter of urgency

UPDATE 2202
Cp.blacknight.com login issues appear to have been resolved for the last few hours. There have been several reports of other issues and our technical team is working through them. If you have any issues please let support@blacknight.com know and provide any details that you can

Apologies for any inconvenience that today's issues may have caused.

We are currently experiencing issues with IE domain updates and registrations.

Our technical team are working on a fast resolution

UPDATE: 1630 This issue has been resolved

Today at 13:55 we had an outage on two of our shared hosting linux servers.

The servers effected were:
pemlinweb05.blacknight.com (81.17.254.86)
pemlinweb06.blacknight.com (81.17.254.87)

The issue was due to a memory change on the server earlier in the day causing the servers to exceed their disk quotas, once the disk space and disk inodes were increased the severs had plenty of room to breath and we're brought back online.

This issue has been fully resolved as of 14:06

We have noticed a very large number of user webspaces that have been attacked by the Gumblar virus (or a derivative of it)

If you are using a Windows based PC we urge you to:

• keep your antivirus software up to date
• scan your PC thoroughly

The virus acts by infecting a user's PC and then uses their FTP login details to install files on their website

NB: If your PC or that of one of your colleagues is infected you will need to clean it properly BEFORE you attempt to fix your website, as otherwise it will simply re-infect the site

UPDATE: Some people have reported success in using this web service to scan their sites for malicious code

UPDATE 2: Some more details on what Gumblar does on an infected PC and how it stops antivirus etc., from detecting it.

More information here

We are currently experiencing severe issues on our network due to some form of denial of service attack

Our technical team are working on it and we will update you as soon as we know more

Update 13:30: We've had the DDOS blocked by 2 carriers so far and we're hoping the rest will get it sorted shortly.

Update: 13:40: All carriers have blocked the DDOS for us at this stage. It was targeted at 1 IP address of one of our VPS customers. Having discussed this with the customer it looks like their VPS was hacked and this may have attracted the DDOS.

Status as of 13:50: All Clear

Summary: We're currently experiencing a network wide outage that has cascaded due to fibre failure in the Dublin area. A brief fibre outage on one of our metro rings seems to have caused some internal routing issues and in turn caused some of our BGP sessions with carriers in InterXion to drop or become non-responsive.

This issue is currently in the midst of being resolved. We'll post an RFO once more information is gathered from logs etc.

Current status: All Clear

We have been informed that the dotmobi (.mobi) registry will be conducting maintenance on July 4th between 1500 and 1900 UTC

Existing .mobi domains will not be affected

Updates and new registrations will not be available