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.
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
Due to unforseen circumstances the installation of the firewall upgrade has been delayed until Tuesday 17th February.
Just a quick post to advise all customers that we will be increasing our Network Protection with the installation of a new FireWall. We have chosen the Juniper SSG with an IPS (Deep Inspection firewall) subscription which should offer increased protection to our servers.
This firewall will be installed on Thursday 12th February.
Just a quick note to advise our customers that our new MasterSwitch, to replace the temporary one has been installed this morning and everything is back up and running.
We would like to thank our customers for their understanding during the downtime.
Server Upgrade
The lasso 8.5 server was upgraded from 2Gb to 6Gb today
Email Server Removal
Due to an unforseen issue we have had to remove the server newpop3.blacknight.co.uk until further notice. All customers on this server have been migrated to pop3.blacknight.co.uk
LassoSoft have announced Lasso 9 which they state is “now compiled to a native executable on the fly. This ensures that your Web pages run at native speed without sacrificing the convenience of a scripting language.” They also state that it offers a 37x speed increase on Lasso 8.5 code. This is very exciting news for the Lasso community of which we are proud to be a part of.
Black Night Software have been providing Lasso Hosting and Lasso Development for many years and is our primary business. So, we fully plan to provide Lasso 9 hosting shortly after it has been released.
To start with we will be downloading the beta as soon as it becomes available and installing it on a local development server. We will choose a handful of sites currently hosting on our Lasso 8.5 server and test them on a local development machine for compatibility issues. The main reason for doing this is to see if we can upgrade the Lasso 8.5 server to Lasso 9 without causing too many problems with existing customer sites.
Keep an eye on this blog because we will be reporting our findings here as soon as the beta arrives.
Due to a customer sending an unauthorised bulk email, some email from today has been backed up and stuck in the email queue. We have rebooted the mail server and mail is now starting to leave.
Please accept our apologies for the downtime.
Please be advised that we will be performing maintenance on the following servers this weekend during the scheduled maintenance window (Saturday 8am to 10am).
Affected servers :
Lasso 8.5 Server : macosx3.blacknight.co.uk
Lasso 7 Server : macosx2.blacknight.co.uk
Lasso 6 Server : macosx.blacknight.co.uk
Mail Server : pop3.blacknight.co.uk
Other services affected by this maintenance :
FileMaker 6 Hosting
Netpublish 7 and 8 Hosting
All other servers and services (including dedicated and managed co-located servers) not listed above will not be affected by this maintenance.
**UPDATE**
The maintenance was carried out with no issues.
Another quick note to state that we are now contactable using Skype - FOR FREE. Why pay to call us when you can call us or chat with us free using Skype.
Our status is shown below, click it to start chat text. To call use the Call option within Skype