Results tagged “Server” from Blacknight Hosting Network Status

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

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.

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.

Unfortunately this site was offline for a good part of this morning.

It's not hosted on our main network and we will be looking into changing how we monitor it in the future, as it was down for a lot longer than we would have liked

If you would like to see what's going on with the server your site is hosted on you now can.

We've setup a simple server / service status page which lists most of our shared hosting servers.

The various services are polled remotely from a server outside our core network once every 60 seconds.

Green - the service is working
Red - the service isn't working
Grey - the service isn't monitored (usually because it's either not available on that server or is not used eg. a mail server wouldn't have a mysql database or if it did you wouldn't be connecting to it)

If you have any feedback on the status page please do let us know!