[Resolved] Major Network Upgrade – Phase 1

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Our network provider (RapidSwitch) are planning a network upgrade, which will add greater capacity, redundancy, future proofing and also allow us to offer you new services such as IPv6.

We are planning to implement this upgrade in two phases over the coming weeks, with the first scheduled window being 1st December between the hours of 01:00 am and 06:00 am GMT. During this window you will experience a very short period of connectivity interruption of less than two minutes as we change the routing configuration from the current equipment to four fully redundant network segments. The second phase, details of which will be released in a separate communication, will involve the migration of the rack uplinks to the new network segments. Once again as a consequence of implementing Phase 2, you will also experience a period of less than two minutes of connectivity interruption.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, and hope that you’ll appreciate that we are undertaking this action to ensure that we can continue to provide you with the best hosting service available.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions concerning this notification.

Update:
We have been awaiting an update from our network provider for stage 2, expecting it to have been completed December 2011/January 2012. Upon contacting them after waiting for an email, stage 2 will be started in the coming months of 2012. Once we have confirmation of the date, we’ll start a new post on this status blog.

[Resolved] Twister – Hardware Failure

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Unfortunately we’re having some network issues with our shared/reseller hosting server Twister. This is being investigated and will hopefully be back online soon.

Update (00:55):
What we thought were just network problems, appear to be worse as the OS seems to have corrupted and we’re now working to reinstall the OS and restore from backups.

Apologies for the problems.

Update (01:55):
The OS has been reinstalled and tests performed on the server to check the hardware. All hardware appears to be fine, however we’ve decided to go with CentOS 5 rather than CentOS 6 which was very buggy for us.

cPanel is now installing and should hopefully be completed soon so we can start restoring accounts.

Update (02:30):
cPanel has installed and we’re now starting to restore accounts. This process is completely automated, so once it completes we’ll give another update.

Update (03:50):
We’re still having issues with this server. Hardware tests on it went fine but it’s constantly crashing while doing normal tasks. This means we’ll unfortunately need to swap the hardware. Fortunately we do have another server at the DC, so that is being setup now.

Update (08:52):
The server is setup, cPanel installed and accounts are restoring. We just need to wait until all accounts are restored successfully.

Update (13:40):
Many accounts have been restored, although there are still a lot more. The restore process depends on the size of each accounts, so the smaller accounts do tend to restore much quicker. We have a lot of data to restore, but please bare with us.

All accounts have now been restored. If you’re having any problems please contact us so this can be looked into.

[Resolved] Twister Maintenance

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We have performed some maintenance on our shared/reseller server Twister. This should improve overall stability of this server.

Update:
Server is being rebooted to complete the work and should be back online within the next few minutes. This is being monitored.