7:11 AM Pacific time: Our technicians are investigating a possible outage on the “web14” server.
Final update: We found the source of the problem — there were a couple of short load spikes over a period of 10 minutes. We have taken steps so that it doesn’t happen again.
We know that uptime is critical for our customers, and we apologize for the inconvenience caused by this event.
We have gotten quite a few reports from users on the East Coast that they cannot connect to their Web sites on our servers, to our Web site, or to our e-mail servers.
Analysis shows that the problem is with a network called nlayer.net which is between them and our servers. When you make a connection to a remote server, the connection travels from your ISP, through several different intermediary networks, and finally to the destination network and server. Each of these networks needs to properly “route” the connection to the next closest node to the destination. The current problem seems to be that the data packets are getting lost within the nlayer.net network.
You can verify this by running the command “tracert www.tigertech.net” on Windows, or “traceroute www.tigertech.net” on Mac (Terminal). You’ll see that your packets can get through your ISP, but after they get handed off to nlayer.net the packets get lost. (A line that ends with *** is a failure.)
While you may have a problem in the network route between your computer and our servers, most other people on the Internet use different routes and can continue getting to your site just fine. You can also verify this with third-party sites, such as checksite.us.
This sort of problem is not uncommon, but is usually resolved within a few minutes. It’s up to nlayer.net to fix their routing; we presume they are working on it.
Update 9:56 AM (Pacific time): It looks like nlayer.net has fixed their problem. We see that customers who had been having problems can now reach their Web sites (and our site) successfully. Please note that no incoming e-mail was lost during this. Any incoming e-mail would have queued up for later delivery, and will get redelivered to our mail servers (soon, if not already).
Even though the cause of this problem was out of our hands, we certainly regret the inconvenience that it caused those who were affected.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 7, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
2:49 AM Pacific time: We’re receiving scattered reports of intermittent problems when connecting to our servers from Europe, although all services on our end are working normally.
3:30 AM Pacific time: This issue appears to be a problem within the network of one of our upstream providers. We have temporarily disabled routing network traffic through that provider, and the trouble is resolved.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, May 24, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
We’ve updated the MySQL database software on our servers from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.37 for security reasons.
Customers should not notice any changes, as the update merely fixes bugs and doesn’t introduce new features. But as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
We recently upgraded Mailman to fix a problem for Yahoo and AOL users, which has worked well.
Today we found a problem where since the initial upgrade on April 24, people who tried subscribing to a Mailman list by sending an e-mail message (instead of using the more common Web interface) weren’t properly added to the list.
This was caused by an incompatibility between our mail system and one of the Mailman software changes. We didn’t receive a report of this problem until today because few people try to subscribe this way.
We’ve resolved this: Any delayed subscriptions have been correctly handled and the incompatibility has been fixed. We apologize to anyone affected by it.
In recent days, Yahoo and AOL made technical changes that prevented their own users from sending messages to most mailing lists. (That’s a simplified summary; your favorite search engine will show the gory details if you search for “Yahoo DMARC mailing lists”.)
If you use the Mailman software to run discussion lists, like many of our customers, this is a problem. To fix it, the authors of the Mailman software are making a new version to work around the Yahoo and AOL change.
That new version hasn’t been officially released yet, but we think this is so important that we’ve upgraded our installed copy of Mailman to a “pre-release” version of the fixed software.
Yahoo and AOL users should now be able to send to our customers’ Mailman lists without trouble.
Over the last couple of days, mail from yahoo.com addresses has been “bouncing” a lot more than usual, often with error messages about “policy” or “DMARC” problems. This is especially true for messages involving mailing lists or forwarding from other addresses.
If you see this happening, it isn’t because of anything wrong on your end, or our end. It’s happening all over the Internet.
At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time Saturday April 5, 2014, the “web07” server will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service for Web sites on that server lasting less than 8 minutes.
Other servers will not be affected. Mail for customers on this server will be queued and delivered after a short delay.
