Saturday 29 November 2008

Scottish Software Awards Dinner

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.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Gladserv Nominated for Scottish Open Source Awards

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!

Friday 1 August 2008

postmaster@me.com

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.

Wednesday 23 July 2008

Nameserver (DNS) upgrades

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.

Monday 21 July 2008

Update From Friday 18/07/2008

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

Friday 18 July 2008

Manchester Data Centre Connection Problems (SOLVED)

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.

Saturday 26 April 2008

Gladserv becomes a Nominet Registrar

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...

Tuesday 15 April 2008

Head Office re-located

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.