Black Night Software Blog

We are aware of a network issue at our datacenter which is impacting on our services. Datacenter engineers are investigating.

Recently we have had increased reports of emails explaining to you that your email settings have changed as shown below.

Please do not click this link, this email is not from us and should be deleted immediately. We have taken steps to block these emails from reaching our customers. If you receive similar messages report them to us so that we can proactively block them.

We will be performing some software updates on the following server this weekend :

Macosx3.blacknight.co.uk

Services affected :

Lasso 8.5 Services
Some Static html sites
Some PHP sites

When and for how long?

There will be a slight speed issue for around 5-10 minutes whilst the software is installed. Once installed there will be a full downtime for a maximum of 5 minutes whilst the server reboots. We plan to carry this out between 8am and 10.30am Saturday 9th January.

Did you know that Black Night Software are on Twitter and Facebook?

Twitter : twitter.com/blacknightsw
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-Night-Software-Mac-Hosting/255292695928
LinkedIn : http://uk.linkedin.com/in/blacknightsoftware

We hope to utilise these sites to keep our customers updated with developments.

We are aware that our main smtp server is being blocked by Hotmail which is possibly due to our server being blacklisted at backscatterer.org. We suspect this was caused due to an accidental loop when we configured a new email server though not 100% certain. We have contacted Hotmail and awaiting a response.

Until we resolve this issue all customers are advised to change their SMTP server to that of your ISP.

WHO IS AFFECTED :
All customers using pop3.blacknight.co.uk/smtp.blacknight.co.uk as their outgoing server and associated web sites that send out email via this server

WHO IS NOT AFFECTED :
Customers who have migrated to newsmtp.blacknight.co.uk or who are using their own ISP SMTP servers

In order to remain competitive and avoid price rises we have made the decision to move our servers away from the Docklands datacentre to a new, highly secure datacentre in Cambridge. By doing this we are also able to grow due to the flexibility that will be provided to us from the datacentre.

However, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Network and internet connections will remain the same. As a result of this move we are going to have to change the IP addresses of all servers and there will be a period of downtime whilst we initiate this change.

Downtime Details for ALL SERVERS

Which server : All servers, including colocation and dedicated

Who is affected : All customers

When : Sunday 8th November

How long : We envisage a downtime of approximately 2.5 hours. Our scheduled plan* is as follows :

09.00 All servers will be configured for the new IP addresses as shown below, shut down and loaded onto transportation. At the same time we will be doing a DNS change so that all domain names that we have in our DNS have the new IP addresses.

09.45 Servers will be transported to Cambridge
13.00 Servers at this point should be being installed and turned on.
12.30 All server should be back online.

*The above times are provisional and are subject to change!

05:00am

We are aware of a problem with pop3.blacknight.co.uk being unresponsive. An engineer is on site and we are investigating the cause. We hope to have the server back online within a few minutes.

05:19

Server is now back online, problem seems to be associated with a secondary drive which was causing the server to lock up. Secondary drive has been removed and server is now back online. We will be monitoring the server over the next day or two to confirm that this drive is indeed faulty.

06:42

Server has once again crashed, we are investigating this issue and will update this page once we have more information

06:50

Server is back online. More to follow…

07:31

We have identified a couple of issues on the server. A customer account is stuck in a bounce loop which is causing non-stop messages to bounce back and forth which has swelled the customer mailbox to over 1.8Gb. We have reset the mailbox and blocked the bounce messages from reaching our server. We will continue to monitor the situation.

12.20

Our clients ISP has cleared the mail from their queue and prevented further bounce backs, client has also turned off the auto-responder so mail service should be now operating as normal. However, we are still continuing to monitor the server.

Thanks for your patience.

09.18am
We are aware of a problem with pop3.blacknight.co.uk which is currently unresponsive. We are investigating now and hope to have this resolved in the next few minutes.

09.33am
This server is now back online

We have just been informed that webmail.blacknight.co.uk has been bouncing messages back with the following message over the last few days.

Your message has been refused due to our spam filters.

This has been fixed, please accept our apologies for this issue which was caused by a corrupt spam filter rule.

To make things easier for those clients on an iPhone we have installed the excellent WPtouch plug in. Here is how the blog will look on your iPhone

Our blog as viewed in WPtouch