Gladserv Service Announcements

Routing Problem Affecting Some Services (resolved)

2011-08-24T14:19:00.003+01:00

Due to a routing issue with one of our upsteam providers a small number of services may be currently unavailable. Engineers are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. We will post back here when more information is available.

Update:

This was caused by a power failure in one of the Manchester datacentres. Most systems failed over correctly, but some customer virtual servers were affected. These customers are being contacted individually.

Authentication Service Outage (resolved)

2011-08-10T14:55:00.003+01:00

There was a prolonged outage this morning of our authentication and directory service which affected many of our systems, most noticeably email.

Due to a double hardware failure, we scheduled emergency maintenance for two of our servers at 8am this morning, which took part of our virtualisation plaform offline. Affected customers were notified individually.

Unfortunately, for reasons we are still investigating, this led to a cascading failure which took our authentication and directory services offline, which affected other services, including email.

Thank you to all our customers for your patience throughout this extended outage. We are still investigating, and will take remedial steps based on what we find. Our authentication and directory services are critical to our infrastructure and are meant to failover seamlessly in the event of a single failure - today they did not.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvience caused.

Brett Sheffield Talks About Spam and Backscatter

2010-08-15T15:19:00.002+01:00

On Wednesday, Brett Sheffield spoke about Spam and Backscatter at Techmeetup Edinburgh.

The talk covers what we know about spam and spammers, and a real world approach to fighting spam.

Subversion Server Maintenance 18:00 tonight

2010-05-05T09:51:00.002+01:00

At 18:00 this evening we will be taking down the subversion server for brief maintenance. This is expected to take no more than ten (10) minutes. This only affects customers with subversion repositories and their associated Trac projects.

NetBSD 5.0.2 available

2010-02-18T10:53:00.002Z

NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released and is available to Gladserv's customers on request.

Short Notice Scheduled Maintenance - 6pm tonight

2010-01-28T15:47:00.002Z

We're performing some short notice maintenance on 'octave' this evening between 1800 and 1900hrs. We expect downtime to be around 15 minutes.

This will affect some virtual server customers and IMAP services. Affected customers will be contacted individually.

I apologise for the short notice.

Gentoo Virtual Servers Available

2009-12-30T17:56:00.003Z

I hope everyone is enjoying the festive season. In Scotland we've had a good snow covering for over a week now, which is unusual for here. With the weather so penguin-friendly, perhaps it is fitting that today we have made Gentoo virtual servers available. Give us a shout at Gladserv if you'd like to try one out.

We've been experimenting with FreeBSD virtual servers, but alas, we're not able to make them available to the public yet. FreeBSD support for Xen has been on and off (mostly off since Xen 2.0 days really). We've not seen much demand for them yet, but if you are interested, let us know. If we get enough requests we'll put some more R&D time into making this production-ready.

Cheers, and enjoy the rest of the season!

Brett and the Gladserv Team

Fedora 12 (Constantine) released

2009-11-18T11:40:00.002Z

Constantine was released yesterday. Want to try out Fedora 12 on a virtual server? Give Gladserv a call.

Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") released

2009-10-30T12:51:00.001Z

Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") has been released. Gladserv now has the Server Edition available as a virtual machine.

Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet

2009-09-02T00:15:00.002+01:00

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090831-internet-40th-video-ap.html

Scottish Open Source Awards 2009 - Open for Nominations

2009-08-13T11:02:00.003+01:00

The awards are on again for their third year. Nominations for Scottish Open Source companies are needed.

Previous winners include Edinburgh's Wolfson Microelectronics (2008) for their work on the Linux kernel and driver platform, and OSC Member Malcolm MacSween's EMC UK (2007). Gladserv was shortlisted for the Open Source Excellence Award last year.

The awards for the last two years have been presented as part of the Scottish Software Awards in Glasgow - a large and well attended event, and have done a lot to raise the profile of Open Source software in Scotland.

http://www.opensourceawards.co.uk/

NetBSD 5.0.1 Virtual Servers Available

2009-08-07T16:03:00.002+01:00

NetBSD 5.0.1 was released on August 2nd. Due to customer demand, NetBSD 5.0.1 virtual servers are now available from £15/month + VAT (17.25 inc VAT). Call +44 131 510 0340 to create an account or email info@gladserv.com for more information.

Gladserv Partners with Social Innovation Camp

2009-06-11T16:23:00.003+01:00

Gladserv has sponsored the latest Social Innovation Camp, to be held in Scotland from 19-21 June 2009.

We are providing a year of free hosting services to the winner, and will be providing server space for the weekend to help support this initiative.

SICamp is about taking a great social idea, and using the leverage of the Internet to take the benefit to as many people as possible. That, to me, is really cool and worth supporting.

Fedora Core 11 almost cooked

2009-06-02T11:08:00.002+01:00

Fedora Core 11 (Leonidas) is due for release on the 9th of June - that's next week - if there are no further delays in the schedule.

Gladserv will make Leonidas available for managed hosting as soon as it is released, with virtual server images tested and available as soon as possible.

Jaunty Jackalope Server Released

2009-04-22T22:41:00.003+01:00

Jaunty Jackalope virtual servers are available from Gladserv from tomorrow (Thursday 23 April 2009).

Ubuntu are releasing the latest version of their server platform and Gladserv are offering this as a virtual hosting service.

Contact us on +44 (0) 131 510 0340 for more information and to create an account.

Scottish Software Awards Dinner

2008-11-29T12:30:00.002Z

The Awards dinner was held at the Radisson SAS in Glasgow and was well attended again this year. It was a great night out and a chance to catch up with those of our partner companies, clients and resellers who were able to attend.

We were shortlisted alongside National Semiconductor UK and Wolfson Microelectronics for the Open Source Business Excellence Award. Congratulations to Wolfson on winning the award this year.

Congratulations also go to one of our partners, Valley Technology, who made the shortlist for two awards: Best Wireless/Mobile Software Solution and Scottish Software Company 2008.

Gladserv Nominated for Scottish Open Source Awards

2008-11-19T21:33:00.001Z

For the second year running, Gladserv is a nominee for the Scottish Open Source Awards. The Awards are held jointly with the Scottish Software Awards at the Radisson SAS in Glasgow on Friday 28th November 2008. See you there!

postmaster@me.com

2008-08-01T21:07:00.004+01:00

Despite being owned by Apple, me.com is very broken. I've added it to Gladserv's "broken sender domains" list so it is excempted from RFC checks until they can fix their servers, because it rejects email for postmaster@me.com (an RFC MUST).

telnet smtp-mx002.me.com 25
Trying 17.148.20.82...
Connected to smtp-mx002.me.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 smtpin133-bge351000 -- Server ESMTP (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging
Server 6.3-6.03 (built Mar 14 2008; 32bit))
HELO gladserv.com
250 smtpin133-bge351000 OK, [89.16.162.35].
MAIL FROM: postmaster@gladserv.com
250 2.5.0 Address Ok.
RCPT TO: postmaster@me.com
550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: postmaster@me.com

Also, several of the MXs appear also appear to be overloaded:


telnet smtp-mx001.me.com 25
Trying 17.148.20.81...
Connected to smtp-mx001.me.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
452 try later
Connection closed by foreign host.

It would be really nice if the big guys could stick to the rules.
Anyone doing basic RFC checks will be rejecting this domain.

Looks like others are having the same problem.

Checking further reveals AOL are rejecting @me.com addresses, amongst
others.

Even worse is that clients were not receiving bounce messages from the me.com servers to tell them what had happened to their email.

I've added an exception for this domain to Gladserv's email servers so
email from me.com will get through. I've also submitted them to www.rfc-ignorant.org to encourage them to play by the rules.

Nameserver (DNS) upgrades

2008-07-23T22:43:00.002+01:00

As part of our rolling upgrade cycle, new nameservers are being brought online and older ones retired. For all domains that we manage these changes will happen automatically, and there is no expected impact on any services.

Update From Friday 18/07/2008

2008-07-21T11:48:00.002+01:00

Gladserv suffered a prolonged outage on Friday afternoon affecting our Manchester servers. The root cause was a hardware failure on a server that had been running for over 470 days. Some web, email and database services were affected for up to four hours. Normally under these circumstances we would failover to another datacentre in London or Edinburgh.

However, attempts to move services to the Edinburgh datacentre were hampered by by high load on those servers. New servers had been installed in London and Edinburgh but were not yet in service. Earlier in the afternoon we had installed a new server in a separate Edinburgh facility to take some of the load, but this server had literally just been plugged in when the Manchester outage happened and so was not ready.

To recover from the outage, an engineer was despatched to the Manchester datacentre to replace the faulty hardware while we worked at preparing the new server in Edinburgh. The Manchester systems were brought back online just as the Edinburgh server came into service.

By early Friday evening all systems were online, including new servers in London and Edinburgh, and an upgraded Manchester server. We continued to work through the weekend to ensure we can recover much more quickly from a similar outage in future. On Sunday evening we performed a firedrill for the most critical systems that failed on Friday and are pleased to say that all went to plan.

Thank you to our affected customers for your patience throughout.

Brett Sheffield
Managing Director

Manchester Data Centre Connection Problems (SOLVED)

2008-07-18T15:17:00.005+01:00

Affecting some email and web services.

London and Edinburgh datacentres are unaffected.

We are currently investigating the cause and hope to have this resolved shortly.

It appears to be a hardware issue, we will update one this has been solved.

More to come soon.

Gladserv becomes a Nominet Registrar

2008-04-26T13:58:00.002+01:00

Gladserv is now a Nominet Registrar, which means we can register .uk top level domains for you using our own tag. We are planning to launch our own self-service domain registration system for our customers very soon. Watch this space...

Head Office re-located

2008-04-15T21:00:00.002+01:00

Gladserv's HQ has moved southwards, closer to more of our customers and partner companies. Our new registered address is:

Blackburn House
Parkneuk
Dunfermline
Fife
KY12 9BL
SCOTLAND

Telephone numbers and all other details remain the same.

This has had zero impact on our hosted services, as we continue to operate servers in datacentres located at London, Edinburgh and Manchester.

Routing Issues Affecting Manchester Servers (resolved)

2007-11-16T17:27:00.000Z

We are currently experiencing some routing issues to our Manchester servers. London and Edinburgh datacentres are unaffected. This will interuptions to email for customers using certain ISPs. We are currently investigating the cause and hope to have this resolved shortly.

Georbl Service Launched

2007-11-11T12:37:00.000Z

Due to customer demand we have added a by-country whitelisting service to our anti-spam measures. In order to implement this the Georbl project was launched. Georbl maps IP addresses to their two-letter country IANA country codes, thus allowing per-country access and filtering rules to be constructed.

Congestion/packet loss affecting Manchester datacentre (resolved)

2007-11-05T15:05:00.000Z

There are some congestion issues that have been affecting the Manchester datacentre for the last few minutes. This should be fixed very shortly.

New Operations Manager appointed

2007-10-26T15:52:00.000+01:00

We are proud to welcome on board Esther Payne in the role of Operations Manager. Esther's skills have been honed over several years in the oil industry in IT Support and as Network Manager for an international e-learning software company. Esther is in charge of the operational side of Gladserv, making sure the wheels keep turning, and working closely with Product Development to improve our customer interfaces.

US Webserver Down (resolved)

2007-09-10T09:40:00.000+01:00

The US webserver is down (again) this morning. As we were in the process of decommissioning this server and there are only a few sites remaining, we are moving all remaining sites to our UK servers immediately. All clients who have are on the US server will be contacted individually.

smtp.gladserv.com - brief outage (resolved)

2007-08-01T16:25:00.000+01:00

One of the servers that provides outgoing email service was unavailable briefly between 16:07 and 16:11 BST today. The problem has been resolved. Any customers experiencing any problems sending other than between those times should contact support.

Service Announcements Blog Launched

2007-07-17T18:49:00.000+01:00

This Blog has been launched with the intention of providing a place to announce upgrades and service announcements. We have chosen to place it outside our network so that, in the event of major outages we will have a place to keep our customers up to date on developments. We hope it wil rarely be needed for that reason!

For more information about Gladserv and the services we provide, go to http://www.gladserv.com/