Between 4:58 and 5:39 AM Pacific time today (March 23), our server which runs the Mailman mailing list software encountered an internal problem. During most of this time, all Mailman-related functionality was unavailable.
Since Mailman most works via e-mail, no data was lost. Some messages might have been slightly delayed, but not for any longer than might normally be noticed with mail delivery via the Internet.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused!
The “calculon” Web server needed to be restarted at 10:14 AM Pacific time, resulting in a five-minute interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server.
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The “zapp” Web server was unavailable between 8:20 and 8:40 Pacific time this morning. This resulted in an interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server.
The problem was caused by a faulty hard disk in the RAID array (which theoretically shouldn’t cause a server to stop responding, but did). The hard disk has been removed from the array and will be replaced tonight at 10 PM. The server will be restarted at that time, resulting in about 4 minutes additional downtime.
We sincerely apologize for this problem. We will be investigating the root cause: it’s normal for hard drives to fail — we expect that occasionally — but it shouldn’t cause such negative effects (normally the RAID array would prevent the failure of any single drive from causing the entire machine to fail).
Between 5:58 and 6:26 AM Pacific time today (March 12), a network problem on one of our mail servers prevented some customers from being able to read and send e-mail.
The issue has been resolved and everything is working normally. Although incoming mail was delayed, no mail was lost. Web site service was not affected.
The cause of the problem was that a debugging tool used by one of our technicians (“tcpdump”), when used with certain options, can apparently cause network interface failures. This was not an issue we were previously aware of. We will avoid using the tool in that manner in the future, so the problem should not recur.
We regret the problem and sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected by this issue.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (March 1), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. This was also done two weeks ago; unfortunately our operating system vendor has released an even newer kernel since then — it doesn’t usually happen this often.
We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
(This maintenance was also successfully completed with less than four minutes of downtime per server.)
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (February 16), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
(This maintenance was successfully completed with less than four minutes of downtime per server.)
This is a followup to last night’s post about a network outage.
The root cause of the problem was the failure of an Ethernet switch at our data center. The switch was the one that our network cables actually plug into to connect to the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s one of the few pieces of the network infrastructure that’s not automatically redundant: although the “other side” of the switch is connected to multiple fully redundant upstream paths to the Internet, the side of it that goes to our server cabinets effectively has a single connection for each a group of servers.
When the switch failed, the data center staff replaced it with a new spare one. Because the faulty hardware was completely replaced, the problem is properly solved, and this won’t be something that’s an ongoing problem.
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Between 9:52 and 11:06 PM Pacific time on January 10, a complete network failure at our primary data center caused an unscheduled outage that resulted in all services (all Web sites and e-mail) being unreachable from the Internet.
This problem has been resolved and all services are now available. We are waiting for a full report from the data center personnel so that we can determine the cause and ensure that it won’t recur.
We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected by this. This kind of outage is not normal (it’s the longest outage we’ve experienced in more than four years), and we know it’s not acceptable to our customers who rely on our services. We’ll post a followup message with more details when they become available.
Update Friday 10 AM: As a clarification, we should also have originally mentioned that no e-mail is lost during this kind of outage: it’s delivered after the issue is resolved. While some messages were certainly delayed, they were all properly delivered afterward.
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail system is available. You’ll find many improved features:
- A flexible search feature that lets you search through subjects, senders, and more.
- The ability to optionally view “unsafe” images in HTML messages.
- Preferences that permanently remember things such as your time zone and date format.
- An easier-to-use address book.
- Optional threaded message display.
- Message filters (sorting incoming mail into certain folders) and highlighting.
- Automatic conversion of many foreign-language character sets to UTF-8 display, making it easier to read messages written in other languages.
- And much more…
If you’re already a Webmail user, you’ll see the new pages the next time you login. If you haven’t tried Webmail before, this page explains how to get started.
By the way, we’ll be keeping our old Webmail system around for a couple of weeks at this special address, just in case anyone experiences any problems and needs to temporarily “downgrade”. If you have any trouble with the new system, do let us know right away so we can address it before the old pages are permanently removed.
We’d also like to thank the more-than-200 people who helped us test the new system over the last few weeks. The new system is better because of your efforts.
From 12:51 to 12:54 PM Pacific time today, one of our inbound mail servers (mx2.tigertech.net) incorrectly rejected some incoming mail that wouldn’t normally have been rejected, due to a configuration problem. This resulted in a small handful of messages being returned to the sender instead of properly delivered.
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