Notification Type
Scheduled Maintenance
Date
August 16, 2010 2:00 AM
Service Affecting
Yes
Message
When: Monday August 16th from 02:00 until 8am
What: Control panel software, provisioning system, Agents on all hardware nodes, mysql nodes, web servers will all be upgraded from version 2.9.4 to version 5.0. During this window access to the control panel will be restricted. However e-mail, hosting etc services should not be affected by this upgrade.
Changes made to webspaces, new or existing e-mail accounts added or modified, new database creations etc during this window would be ill advised.
Services Affected:
cp.blacknight.com - Control Panel only.
Windows Shared hosting servers may be restarted. only if the upgrade of the management application proves to be problematic.
Linux Shared hosting servers may be restarted. only if the upgrade of the management application proves to be problematic.
Exchange Servers may be restarted, but due to the design of the Hosted Exchange no downtime should be noticed.
Qmail servers will have their imap/pop3/smtp services restarted as new versions of the software get put in place. Also changes may be made to LDAP so there could be intermittent authentication issues.
Sitebuilder servers should not be affected.
VPS nodes will have some software upgraded, but end users should experience no downtime.
Domain registrations and modifications will not be affected by this upgrade.
Update 07:40 Monday 16th:
The upgrade is still being performed at the moment, but it's in it's final stages. We'll post an "all clear" notice when it's complete.
Update 08:45 Monday 16th:
During the upgrade Parallels appear to have broken the provisioning system somehow. As this drives the Control Panel the CP is still down. They're working to resolve this issue but we've got no ETA as of yet.
Update 1045
The maintenance and upgrade has been completed. If anyone has any specific issues post-upgrade please contact our helpdesk
Some of my clients are complaining that sites and email (on shared hosting) are too slow. Will this upgrade improve speed?
David
Hi David,
No this won't upgrade any of the hosting servers themselves, but it will improve the speed of the control panel and provisioning.
If you have specific issues with site speed, please open a ticket so we can identify the bottleneck and perform upgrades where possible.
Things to look at regarding website slowness:
1) SQL queries, blogs such as wordpress or applications like Joomla have no caching by default. For wordpress install WC Total cache or WP SuperCache and for joomla just enabling caching.
2) If it's a custom application that has it's own SQL queries, use Explain before any SQL query to find out if it's taking a long time to run or figure out what could be wrong with it.
3) Which database type is in use? If mysql4, then move to mysql5 and you'll see a performance upgrade. Our newer mysql5 nodes are 64bit and have more ram and faster CPUs.
Paul
Thanks for that Paul,
The complaints from clients are mostly with Webmail, for me it's FTP, the sites themselves seem to be running just fine.
Just to be aware, there have been a lot of clients complaining about delays on email lately and some want us to move them to google.
David
other than that, keep up hte good work.
d
David
With respect to FTP - what have you been seeing exactly? Which ISP are you using? If you can let support know we can look into it.
As for webmail - what are people complaining about exactly?
Michele
Hi Michele,
Some of my clients use webmail primarily, they are complaining that the webmail application itself is very slow.
My own experience of late is that FTP can pause with no reason sometimes leading to time outs. I use Filezilla and dreamweaver for the odd file.
Eitherway, this is not the right platform for this stuff, if the problems get bad I'll submit tickets, I really just wanted to know if your upgrade would speed up performance, Paul has already mentioned that "but it will improve the speed of the control panel and provisioning", I'm happy with that:)
David
With my mail I just use the application "Mail" on my mac. I thought everyone else would of been doing this already because its much faster. I'm sure there is something else if you OS is windows.
Thanks for the notification.
Wow. Big difference! CP is much snappier.
Don't dread having to update DNS records in the CP anymore!
Diarmuid.