[UPDATE]
The maintenance work was undertaken with no issues.
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We apologise for the lack of notice.
The main UPS is being serviced today. We expect no down-time or service issues.
[UPDATE] The server move was completed successfully. We believe that all sites are functioning correctly. However, if you think your site has a problem, please email support@merula.net in the normal manner.
[PLANNED WORK] We are seeing a sudden large number of hard drive errors indicating a possible near-term failure on this server which hosts a small number of shared websites. To ensure that this doesn’t cause problems later, we have decided to move this server to a new VM after normal business hours today unless the error rate increases and we need to move more quickly. Down-time of no more than an hour should be expected. We apologise for the short-notice.
UPDATE: This appears to have been an issue inside BT which has now been cleared by them.
We are seeing a few reports of users unable to login or authenticate ADSL sessions. We can see no problems here at the moment but are investigating further. If you are having problems, please email support@merula.net or call into the support line.
As many of you know, this site is currently the main route for notifications of outages or issues (whether planned or not).
This won’t change but we are now making a number of additional improvements to ensure that updates are available as soon as possible and, importantly, are available at all times.
The first stage in this work is to re-locate the noc server to a dual-homed location in Manchester so that (nuclear attack aside) this will be immune to any issues affecting Huntingdon and Merula and will ensure people can receive updates even if the data centre itself is unavailable for whatever reason.
We know that last night the noc server was down for a while during the outage, which, whilst planned for and announced, is less than ideal. In future, this won’t be the case.
We’ll also be changing slightly the layout, removing obsolete links and making the site easier & quicker to navigate.
There’s a very useful option available on the noc site to sign-up for an RSS feed or (shortly) an email notification which will mirror our postings here and we strongly suggest that all of our customers take advantage of this facility.
We’ll also be adding a feed from BT of their notifications to us of work & outages which will be displayed there, which will allow customers to check if this is a local, major BT or Merula related issue. This is currently available here but soon will be part of a “dashboard” of notifications on the main page.
We’ve setup a Twitter account to be fed by (or feed to) the noc site, so you can follow that account as well http://twitter.com/MerulaSupport.
We’ll also be continuing to update the telephone support number status message which should be used as the primary support route.
As a reminder to everybody, the normal support number is 0845 330 0666.
Finally, we’ve today setup a second, fallback support number which rings directly at our support centre, to be used in the event that the phone system here (and support number which routes from here) is unavailable for whatever reason. Please take a note of this new number: 0844 2011771