Emergency mail-server down-time today [complete]

Following the problems we’re still seeing as part of the over-running planned upgrade to our email infrastructure, we’ve decided that it’s necessary to take the mail-servers off-line at 5pm today for a period of up to 2 hours to allow this syncing to proceed quickly to completion.

Once that has occurred and run to completion, we’re confident that the new system will respond correctly as planned.

Update: The primary server is now back in service with all emails – We will be working on the backup server tomorrow – however we do not expect this to be service affecting.

Update: The mail servers are now back as a resilient pair – initial testing has shown this to be much faster and reliable – any issues please contact support

Mail Server Maintenance / Upgrade [complete]

[UPDATE]

Update: The mail servers are now back as a resilient pair – initial testing has shown this to be much faster and reliable – any issues please contact support

22nd April, 10:53am

We’re aware of slow-downs affecting some email users and are making some “behind the scene changes” to prioritise sending & receiving emails during the day, deferring the syncing of the old email archive until the early hours. We believe that this final sync will be finished by tomorrow at which point the full effects of the new hardware will be apparent.

10.30am — We are in touch with the supplier of the mail server software, as the process is taking far longer than they indicated would be needed. We apologise for this degraded service, which based on the progress so far, seems likely to continue being less than ideal for the rest of the day.

09:00AM The synching process is taking longer than we’d hoped, so whilst this is continuing the symptoms mentioned below will continue. Email access is currently slow as these processes carry on.

We are working to upgrade two of our primary mail servers to new, faster hardware over the next few days. During the early hours of the morning (one each day) one of our mail servers will be replaced.

This will lead to a short downtime while the server is physically replaced and a period while the new mail server syncs its data from the old server. During this time you may find that some mail is not displayed if you use IMAP or Web to collect email. No email will be lost and once the sync completes all email will be visible again.

Once we are sure the first server is in place and behaving we will repeat the exercise replacing the second server.

We will update this post as the work progresses

 

Some ADSL sessions may have just dropped

We had to reboot one of our core ADSL routers as we were aware of various problems affecting a significant number of lines and we took the decision that a very short outage was needed to allow these sessions to be cleared down. We have seen all of the affected lines come back successfully, so believe that this is now resloved. Apologies to anyone who briefly lost their connection.

[UPDATE] Calling us on Tuesday 14th April

The porting has now completed and we believe everything is now routing correctly. Please notify us as below if you become aware of any  problems.

_______________________________________________________________

Tomorrow we port our numbers to a new provider which may mean that, for a short window during the working day, the main 01480 numbers cease to be routed correctly.

Normal service will resume after this window; unfortunately we don’t know from the supplier exactly what time this will process will occur but down-time should be minimal.

If you should need to call in and find that the number is unobtainable or isn’t answered, please call our temporary number:

01480 708010

or email support@merula.net

 

[UPDATE] Possible loss of connectivity to hosted servers at Avro Court 22nd April

There may be a brief (max. 15 minute) loss of connectivity to servers & services hosted at Avro Court on this date as one of our back-haul providers (Virgin Media) upgrades their connections in London and locally. This work is scheduled for the early hours of the morning on 22nd and we will be monitoring this at all the way through the maintenance window to ensure that this completes successfully and that there are no residual issues.

We have been told that this work will occur between 1am & before 6am.

From monitoring previous such work we expect our network resilience to mean that there will be no loss of connectivity — we have flagged this as a possible “at risk” however.