Blacknight Hosting Network Status

DotMobi Registry Maintenance

2009-07-02T11:26:30Z

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

Pemlinweb04 Experiencing Performance Issues

2009-06-29T22:39:40Z

The Linux webserver pemlinweb04 is currently experiencing performance issues.

Our technical support team are aware of the situation and are currently investigating it.

Update: 2359 This issue appears to have been resolved

Wordpress 2.8 available for upgrade and new installs

2009-06-19T08:17:41Z

Today we've put wordpress 2.8-5 into the app vault for you all to upgrade to and all new installs should use this.

If you follow the below steps you should be safe and encounter few if any problems:

1) Backup your files and databases before performing this upgrade.
2) Disable all custom plugins before upgrading also
3) upgrade via the app vault
4) re-enable plugins 1 by 1

Please let us know how you get on with this. All feedback is welcome.

DNS.be Scheduled Maintenance

2009-06-09T13:35:56Z

The .be registry (dns.be) is conducting some scheduled maintenance this afternoon from 5pm onwards.

The expected timeframe is about 10 minutes.

This will only impact new .be domain registrations being processed

www.blacknight.com under attack by a DDOS

2009-06-03T13:05:58Z

Our main website is currently under attack. We're working to mitigate this attack at the moment and hope to have our site back online shortly.

We'll post further updates when we have them.

Update: 20:30

This attack is on-going, our site may be available to some people and not to others. We're working on a resolution currently. We hope to resolve this issue in the next 24 hours.

Update: June 9th 08:15

This DDOS continued for 4 days solid. We did however keep our site online for the duration and I'll write up some notes on how we did this in the not too distant future.

Power Strip Issue in Interxion

2009-05-29T15:25:00Z

At approximately 2pm this afternoon one of the power strips in one of our cabinets in Interxion "tripped".

As most of the servers in the rack are either dual powered or using the other side's PDU the issue wasn't spotted immediately.

Once the issue was identified the data centre staff reset the trip and power was restored.

All affected clients have been contacted or attempted to be contacted.

Server Upgrades

2009-05-26T20:41:57Z

The following servers will be rebooted between 6:00 and 7:00 am on Thursday May 28th.

pemlinweb01 through pemlinweb12

This is to facilitate some memory upgrades due to spikes in activity during peak hours. We'll be doing them in batches starting with:

pemlinweb01.blacknight.com
pemlinweb03.blacknight.com
pemlinweb05.blacknight.com
pemlinweb10.blacknight.com

then:

pemlinweb02.blacknight.com
pemlinweb04.blacknight.com
pemlinweb06.blacknight.com
pemlinweb11.blacknight.com

then:

pemlinweb07.blacknight.com
pemlinweb08.blacknight.com
pemlinweb09.blacknight.com
pemlinweb12.blacknight.com

The reboots should be quite quick as the memory install should only take 30 seconds per node.

If you have any issues after 07:00 on the 28th please contact support immediately.

NB: All times are Dublin, Ireland. This service notice only affects shared servers. It has no impact on VPS servers

Update: 07:00

Phase 1 and 2 complete with all nodes back online. An unforeseen set back has delayed the startup of pemlinweb7/8/9/12. Once an fsck is done on these machines they should be back up. It's around 25% of the way done. We estimate that they'll be back by approx 07:30. I'll post further updates shortly. This maintenance window has been extended for another hour as a precaution.

Update: 07:35

Those machines are now back online. This maintenance window is now completed and closed.

Temporary Network latency

2009-05-20T15:19:37Z

We experienced an issue today where one of our transit routers had an issue due to the carriers router flapping it's bgp session. We've shut down this BGP session and had a conversation with the carrier about the issue. While bgp was doing it's thing, some people may have noticed some latency or slowness to connect. This was due to the routes moving from 1 ISP to the other.

Currently Global Cross and Cogent are carrying our traffic. Level(3) are out of the picture for the moment.

Further updates will be posted as we have them.

Update: 17:05

Packet Exchange have acknowledged an issue on their network. One of their customers was advertising the Level(3) router IP into the same VLAN we're in. So Level(3) and this other customer were fighting for the IP. This session is still down.

As an interim measure to ensure we continue to offer the same high level of service that our customers are used to we're putting Tiscali back into the loop. So we'll be back to 3 live carriers. This is happening now and Tiscali should be starting to take traffic away from Cogent and Global Crossing.

Further updates will be posted until this issue is resolved.

Update: 14:55 May 21st

Packet Exchange report that this issue is resolved. We've also received an RFO. With this in mind we'll be turning Level(3) back up at 18:30 this evening. This will cause some brief latency while routes re-converge. A final update will be posted once our engineering team confirm everything is ok once we bring this circuit back up.

Update: 20:30 May 21st

Level(3) has been live for the past 2 hours and all is looking well. This is the last update on this particular ticket. We're closing it now.

Shared Server Ragnell Experiencing Issues

2009-05-15T18:06:56Z

The shared, DirectAdmin, server "Ragnell" is currently experiencing issues.

Our technical team are working on a resolution.

This notification only affects sites on that server.

UPDATE: 1940 As the server is unresponsive a reboot is required.

UPDATE: 2027 Service was fully restored a few minutes ago.

Network connectivity issues

2009-05-14T13:55:29Z

At around 14:40 today we began to notice a slow down in connections to parts of our firewalled network in the InterXion data centre. This can affect any of our new shared hosting plans, VPS plans, and some dedicated and colocated equipment.

Our engineers are working on what may be causing the network congestion and the symptoms range from either a slow connection to your website, VPS, or server, or a temporary loss in connection entirely.

This is not affecting all services in this data centre and it is not a total loss of connectivity, there is just congestion that is slowing down the traffic into some parts of the firewalled network that protect the above systems.

More Screencasts Added

2009-05-12T08:10:44Z

We've added a few more screencasts to our YouTube channel covering:

Editing dns entries
Creating / Managing MySQL databases
Setting up cronjobs (Linux)

They are also embedded on the Wiki

We recommend viewing the HD version where possible, as the image quality is a lot better

Window VPS node reboot

2009-05-11T10:16:45Z

The Windows VPS node pemvzwin04 requires an emergency reboot, which will be carried out at 23:00 this evening. All VPSs hosted on this node will be effected. Downtime will be in the region of 20 minutes.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Affected VPSs:

78.153.209.65
78.153.209.106
78.153.209.226
78.153.209.175
78.153.210.18
78.153.210.16
78.153.210.20
78.153.210.22
78.153.210.23
78.153.210.27
78.153.210.28
78.153.210.30
78.153.210.18
78.153.210.36
78.153.210.37
78.153.210.38
78.153.210.42
78.153.210.53
78.153.210.54
78.153.209.95
78.153.210.69
78.153.209.253
78.153.210.70
78.153.210.76
78.153.210.80
78.153.210.88
78.153.210.46
78.153.210.121
78.153.210.126
78.153.210.132

pear module MDB2 and mysql drivers installed

2009-05-07T15:40:47Z

Today we've installed the follow pear modules and drivers on all our linux shared hosting plans on our new system.

i.e. any linux package where you login to cp.blacknight.com to administer it, has these features available.

On php4:

MDB2 + mysql driver

On php5:

MDB2 + mysql + mysqli drivers

This is effective immediately.

Qmail Cluster Issues

2009-05-06T11:02:29Z

Our Qmail cluster was experiencing some issues earlier this morning.

For an unknown reason which is still being investigated, qmail stopped closing connections correctly and eventually ran out of available connections causing the outages.

Forcefully killing off the stuck qmail processes and restarting qmail fixed the issues, and it's still being monitored

UPDATE: 12:24

On further investigation our technical team found some other issues, which would have impacted end users

In essence LDAP had issues. As LDAP looks after all authentication then other services would have appeared to be degraded.

Share Tips and Tricks With Other Users

2009-05-03T12:58:41Z

Image via Wikipedia

Although we may not reply to all negative comments that people make about us in public, we do listen to what people are saying about us.

One area which people have expressed concern, disappointment and frustration over the last few months has been in relation to documentation for the various services we offer.

In order to help address this we recently launched a wiki so that both our staff and clients could share tips, tricks, tutorials, howtos etc.,

At the moment there isn't a huge amount of content, but it is growing.

Areas covered include:

VPS
Plesk
Domain Registration
Shared Hosting
Control Panels

And anything that people want it to cover...

We chose MediaWiki to run the system, so if anyone wants a particular extension installed or other option enabled please do let us know

All feedback is welcome