Black Night Software Blog

Black Night Software owner, Stephen Thirlwell is now a Certified Lasso Developer. This means that he has been tested and accredited by LassoSoft.

Stephen Thirlwell has been developing Lasso web sites since 1999.

Black Night Software are proud to announce that we are a LassoSoft Hosting Partner. We will be announcing our Lasso 9 hosting plans within the next week or two.

Black Night Software have been developing and hosting Lasso driven web sites from conception to deployment in a shared or dedicated server environment since 1999.

We’ve become aware of a fault at the registry where some domains with the registry INWW/Melbourne IT have had additional name servers added to each domain name.

This is causing sporadic domain name resolution meaning email and web services may be down, you may see a search engine style domain parking page instead of your site. We are working with INWW to resolve this. We expect to have it resolved over the next few hours.

Note that this only affects customers who have .com, .net, .info, .org, .biz registered through us or handled by us. Customers that have their domains registered elsewhere will not be affected unless they also use INWW.

Country specific domain names such as .co.uk, .org.uk etc are not affected by this issue.

If you are concerned about this please contact us via email/phone or Skype.

We will be performing an upgrade on the following server on SUNDAY 5th December at 10am :

Email Server - newpop3.blacknight.co.uk

Services Affected

Incoming and Outgoing email

For how long?

We anticipate a maximum of 30 minutes downtime with actual downtime expected to be a few minutes however due to nature of this upgrade there is a risk of extended downtime.

**Edit**

Server upgrade changed to 12 December 10am

**Edit 2 @ 10:00 12th December**

Server is undergoing a pre-maintenance back-up, the upgrade will happen shortly.

Due to an increase in SPF blocking we have decided to disable this feature at the current time. Instead of bouncing messages with an allow notification for your senders to unblock themselves if legitimate it will now add to the SPAM scoring system and stamp them as such in the header.

This may result in a slight increase in spam, please keep us informed of how you think this change has affected you.

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