Over the next four weeks, we’ll be migrating customer Web sites to upgraded servers. The servers have updated software (and upgraded hardware in some cases), and are also located in a data center with increased power reliability.
For most customers, these changes will be completely unnoticeable. However, a very small number of customers might notice software differences or experience up to five minutes total of “downtime” at some point. We recommend reading through this entire post for details.
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We’re making a determined effort to post Twitter status updates very quickly if our monitoring systems detect any kind of problem.
Earlier, we tweeted “We’re investigating a possible outage on the mail.tigertech.net server” because one of the multiple external monitoring systems we use alerted us that it was unable to connect to our mail server cluster.
Upon investigation, it turns out to have just been a false alarm. There was a problem with the monitoring system; there was nothing wrong with the mail servers at all. Unfortunately, there’s probably no way to prevent occasional false alarms like this; we’d rather get the information out quickly, and by definition that means posting preliminary information before we’ve had a chance to fully investigate what’s happening.
Between 6:00 AM and 6:29 AM Pacific time August 7, 2011, all services were unavailable due to a power failure at our primary data center.
The problem was resolved for most servers by 6:29 AM, and for all servers except the “amy” server by 6:53 AM. The “amy” server needed extra manual intervention, and was working by 7:55 AM. All services are now operating normally.
Any e-mail that arrived during the outage was queued at our secondary data center and delivered as soon as the outage ended.
We sincerely apologize for this problem. We know you count on us for reliability, and we don’t consider this acceptable, especially since the data center has had previous power problems this year. However, this incident had a different root cause. It wasn’t a utility power failure that the redundant UPS systems didn’t handle, but was instead caused by a circuit breaker incorrectly “tripping” to prevent the power output of the UPS systems from reaching the server cabinets.
Update 4:15 PM: We have received an incident report from the data center indicating that they are working to replace the affected part of the UPS system to prevent further problems.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time July 26 2011, the “pazuzu” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “pazuzu” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
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Many, many years ago, some e-mail programs didn’t use a password when sending outgoing mail. That meant they didn’t work with many mail servers, including ours. To help customers with that problem, we used to allow a horrible alternate method called “POP before SMTP”, although it was never recommended or officially supported (it was unreliable and made it harder for us to prevent spam).
Well, here we are in a new millennium (“welcome!”). No popular mail program has needed “POP before SMTP” for more than a decade, and only a small handful of our customers are still using it. But spammers are continually trying to take advantage of the security problems it creates for all e-mail addresses, making it just as much of a nuisance on our end as it ever was.
Because of that, we no longer allow e-mail addresses to send mail using “POP before SMTP” unless they were previously doing so. In other words, if an address wasn’t using “POP before SMTP” before now, it won’t be able to start using it in the future.
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We’ve updated our servers with a Perl security bug fix. This won’t affect most customers, but read on if you know you use Perl scripts on your site.
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The “fry” server was the victim of a high-bandwidth Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack beginning at 3:11 AM Pacific time this morning. On that server, Web pages were intermittently slow to load or generated timeout errors. (Other servers were not affected.)
We’ve blocked the large number of IP addresses from the “botnet” attacking the server, and the issue was completely resolved by 4:19 AM Pacific time. Please accept our apologies if you noticed any problems with your site loading slowly during this period.
We’ll be performing brief maintenance on the Web server that runs the Mailman list interface and archives tonight (June 9, 2011) between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Pacific time.
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Microsoft FrontPage was once a popular Web design program. Microsoft stopped selling FrontPage in 2006, though, and we’ve been warning about the end of FrontPage support for a while now (on both our support pages and our blog).
That time has now arrived. Our FrontPage support for new sites will end on September 1, 2011, and support for existing sites will end a year after that.
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World IPv6 Day is now in progress (it started at midnight UTC, which was 5:00 PM Pacific time). For the next 24 hours, many sites on the Internet, including our own www.tigertech.net, are fully IPv6-enabled.
If you have trouble connecting to www.tigertech.net, check other sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you have problems with any of those, you should test your IPv6 connection and notify your ISP or network administrator about any problems.
For more information about IPv6 (and how sites hosted with us can participate), see our previous post: Now We Are Six: IPv6 support.
