Black Night Software Blog

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.

20:04 - 21.12

We are currently aware of an email issue with one of our mail servers.

pop3.blacknight.co.uk is currently not responding and is being investigated.
newpop3.blacknight.co.uk is not affected 

*edit*
Server has been restored to full service. 

8.20pm - 8.30pm
Our APC Masterswitch unit developed a fault and cut the power to all servers. We have since restarted all outlets and all servers and services are back online.

A replacement unit will be ordered as soon as possible

We are currently investigating a problem with the Mail server corrupting mailboxes and delaying email.

Whilst we do not think these issues are related we are running emergency maintenance on the mail server and as a result it is currently offline.

We will update this post as soon as we have more information.

**Edit** 18.39
Server diagnostics have found no hardware or software issues. We have restarted the mail server and will continue to monitor developments 

Please be advised that we will be performing maintenance on the following server(s) this weekend during the scheduled maintenance window (Saturday 8am to 10am).

• Lasso 8.5 Server : macosx3.blacknight.co.uk

Other services affected by this maintenance :

• None

All other servers not listed above are not affected by this maintenance. Downtime is expected to be around 3 minutes after the updates have finished and during the updates you may see slow serving speed.

**Update**

8.55am The updates have been installed